Matthew honestly thought he was a great manager.

He’d practically grown up in his family’s steel business and had risen through the ranks when he started working there after college. HIs entire life he’d been good-looking, athletic, and popular, and people listened to him whenever he spoke. When employees mentioned to him that they were being ignored, or spoken over, or left out, he felt some sympathy but couldn’t relate, and could only offer the same old advice about speaking up more.

Then Matthew put on a VR headset.

For the next eight minutes, he found himself in a position…

Here is a short list of things corporate bosses and managers have done to me:

Screamed at me in the middle of a newsroom

Thrown a Blackberry at me (and no, I did not work for Naomi Campbell)

Yelled at me because we weren’t covering a story, when the link to the story we “weren’t covering” she sent me came from our own publication

All manner of sexual harassment, from the overt questions about my personal life to subtle microaggressions

And so on, and so on.

Now, these various awful bosses have all continued to fail upwards, and pull the…

Monica is a young mother at the end of her rope. She’s cobbling together a living at minimum wage jobs, crashing with her unemployed boyfriend, who might have anger and substance abuse issues, and caring for a young child with asthma and a baby who is failing to thrive. On top of that, her ex-boyfriend has called children’s services to report her for negligence, one more stressor in a fractured and chaotic life.

Luckily, Monica gets a caseworker who cares, asks the right questions, and is understanding and empathetic. Things start to move in the right direction…and then, that case…

Tell your employees to clear out a space in their home office. Send them a VR headset. Have them plug it in and charge it up. Now they’re ready for an afternoon of discovery and learning in the new world of virtual reality.

Yes, it’s that easy.

If you choose to use the new Oculus Quest, it’s only $299 for 64GB of RAM; it weighs under two pounds. But you don’t need to know RAM from ROM to use and enjoy the new headset. …

Earlier today, UK-based virtual concert startup MelodyVR announced it was buying Napster, which you probably remember as the music piracy service that almost got you kicked out of college for using too much bandwidth. In recent years, Napster struck licensing deals with labels and was bought and sold, but never achieved the market penetration of services like Spotify or Apple Music; it was most recently owned by Rhapsody and repacked as a B2B music play.

With this acquisition, MelodyVR is taking a direct shot at the Wave, whose most recent partnership with The Weeknd and TikTok drew huge buzz. Until…

AlwayS go OUT in an Ice St0Rm.❄️

In January of 2005, I ignored dire weather reports and went to see a friend’s band play 🎶, only to run into an old colleague who wound up making me a LIFE changing job offer that night.

10 years later, I braved the cold to go see EMA, an indie musician, play a show at MoMA PS1 in Queens 👸 as part of the performance, members of the audience put on an Oculus DK1 and did a short VR experience. …

In addition to my day job, I have taught for several semesters as an adjunct professor at NYU. The state of New York recently passed a law mandating sexual harassment training, and I got an email from the university with a link to complete the required course. I followed directions, and an hour later, I wanted to cry.

The course was awful. It started with two visually dull, droning videos that mentioned a lot of regulations but were easy enough to tune out as I backgrounded the screen and answered emails and read Twitter. I then saw a series of…

First, a little story. Three years ago, when I was working at a VR production company, two men came by to demo a platform they were building. I hopped in the Vive and one of them immediately started barking instructions at me: “click the trigger! Now teleport over there! No, over there! Now use the button to scroll up! No, the other button!” Finally, I took the headset off out of sheer frustration and exhaustion, only to have one of them ask me if I even knew how to use VR at all.