A few years ago, I was in a meeting with a client and she shared a competitor’s bid with me. For the same as it cost to create a custom VR piece, this company wanted to license a pre-created VR piece and charge a per seat fee — meaning that as the piece succeeded and more people wanted to use it, the company would have to pay more. …

Several years ago, when I was a staff writer at Billboard, a new editor came in and for some reason decided he disliked me. He assigned stories in my subject area to other writers without checking with me, once asked me if I was dating a member of a band whose story I was pitching (for the record: no, I just liked their album), and just generally treated me poorly. Frustrated, I took him to lunch and point blank asked how he thought I could do my job better. His (useless) answer: “be less rockist.” Dutifully, I spent the following…

And how Facebook can change that before it’s too late.

Many years ago I was sitting in a bar when a friend pulled out her shiny new iPhone one. I cooed over a piece of hardware that my broke grad school self was too poor to even think about, but she quickly burst my bubble. “It looks cool,” she said, “but it’s kind of useless. Honestly my Blackberry is so much better and more useful — I can’t even get my work email on the iPhone because corporate won’t set it up. The iPhone is just a toy.”

My friend…

Just over five years ago, I flew to Austin to appear on a panel about VR and music at SXSW. At the time, I was still working in the music startup space, but was curious about VR and how it could be used in the music industry. One of my fellow panelists was a VR director named Kevin Cornish, and after the panel we stayed in touch. Within a few months, I had joined his new VR production company, Moth+Flame, doing business development and a bit of everything else, including arranging production insurance, learning how to use InDesign to update…

By now, most people have seen the horrifying video of a 65-year-old Filipino woman, Vilma Kari, being brutally attacked as the staff in a condo building look on and at one point, close the building door, rather than trying to intervene. As the number of attacks on the AAPI community mount, many of us are starting to think about how we would step in if we witnessed an attack — but knowing how to react in the heat of the moment is something many of us simply aren’t ever taught.

Many years ago, I witnessed a violent fight between a…

Being confronted with your own bias is never enjoyable. Several years ago, I was training a colleague on some new procedures, and I just forwarded along a detailed text document and told him to reach out if he had questions. A few days later, I followed up with him, and he admitted he hadn’t gotten all the way through it, despite the fact that a document like that would have only taken me an hour to read, at most. I was frustrated and internally questioned his commitment to the job, but then, luckily, he chose to confide in me. He…

The number of companies creating VR applications for training and education has grown exponentially in recent years, and on balance that’s a great thing. As the technology becomes more available and more normalized, we are starting to see amazing results, including a 75% decrease in training costs and a 31% decrease in employee turnover, from projects we have worked on.

Unfortunately, as VR becomes more accessible, the number of people creating bad VR applications has risen as well. Think of VR like Twitter — a platform many people can use but few can use well. Anyone can post a tweet…

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…