AR & VR

In this hallway-style episode of the podcast, a16z partners Connie Chan and Kyle Russell discuss recent announcements at Facebook's annual developer conference, F8, in the context of trends such as: messaging and QR code...

Evolution and technology have allowed our human species to manipulate the physical environment around us — reshaping fields into cities, redirecting rivers to irrigate farms, domesticating wild animals into captive food sources, conquering disease. But now, we’re turning that “innovative gaze” inwards: which means the main products of the 21st century will be bodies, brains, and minds. Or so argues Yuval Harari, author of the bestselling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind and of the book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, in this episode of the a16z Podcast.

Once upon a time, Robert Stromberg got a phone call from "Jim" Cameron (aka James Francis Cameron of Terminator and Titanic fame) about a little project called Avatar. Before he knew it, he was responsible for designing...

The building blocks for VR and AR are finally here -- but the content is just beginning. So everything you'll actually experience and consume in these new mediums over the next few years is being built right now. Formats...

The most recent Oculus Connect event (the third and largest yet) has been lauded as bringing us closer than ever to the future promised for virtual reality or VR. There have been many hardware moves by many players, both...

"Apple isn't just a tech company; it's a tastemaker." Remember the iconic ads of dancing silhouettes in black, with only the headphone wires visible in white? They were a critical part of the larger buy-Apple innovation...

Seemingly overnight, a single game -- Pokémon Go -- has taken people by storm. But it's a game that was technically years in the making, building on a legacy of creative intellectual property and technologies such as mob...

The future of immersive virtual reality is often depicted as a dystopian view of millions of people spending hours alone each day, with huge gadgets stuck to their face, enraptured by fantastical worlds.

If you think back on any of your life’s most indelible experiences -- meeting someone special for the first time; stepping off a plane in an utterly foreign place; a meaningful moment with family and friends; watching a...

Technology has always been a force in how we live, work, and play; only now it's accelerating and compounding in unexpected ways. But just because we don't know exactly what form that tech will take (sharing homes on Air...

When it comes to free software, there’s a sharp cultural divide between the tech world and the gaming world. It’s normal for a startup to make heavy use of open source, and it’s normal for a big tech company to give away...

In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Marc Andreessen and 21 co-founder Balaji Srinivasan cover everything from deciding what ideas to work on and the optimal type of startups to work at, to the funding environment and pendulum swings of deciding when to IPO. They also discuss the VC “formula” of weighting product vs. market vs. team; the full-stack approach to cracking industries that tech could never enter before; and recent tech trends and news including The DAO, AI, VR/AR and the “Instagrammification of everything”, more.

Innovation or invention? Platform or app? Vertical or horizontal? Strategy or tactic? Does the smartphone eat VR? And (not to get all existential about it or anything but), what is an app, really?

Virtual reality is coming fast, and everyone seems to assume that it will be gamers who get to have all the fun first. But there are other applications for VR that could also bring it into the mainstream. “It could very...

Our virtual reality-enabled future is arriving, but it’s hard to know -- as it is with every new technology platform -- how quickly we’ll all make the transition to VR and what it will ultimately look like. For example,...

AS COMPANIES LIKE Oculus, Valve, and Google address virtual reality’s technological hurdles, the interesting problems in VR no longer hinge on the question, “Can we do this?” Instead, for those working in the field, the...

We know that the gaming industry -- in some ways like but in other ways unlike the music industry -- has been changing due to the internet and especially technologies around crowdfunding, online discovery, and direct fan...

In the VR community, “presence” is a term of art. It’s the idea that once VR reaches a certain quality level your brain is actually tricked  --  at the lowest, most primal level  --  into believing that what you see in f...

Up until now virtual reality has been a disappointment for all those people pining for their own personal holodeck. But advances in the components required to create a truly immersive digital 3D experience have finally b...