Abstract: Kent Bye has been working tirelessly over the last decade documenting the emergence of virtual reality through his Voices of VR podcast. Over hundreds of episodes and countless hours of interviews, Bye has been able to offer a glimpse at the continuing development of this nascent medium and the related technologies. Topics discussed range from festival coverage and interviews with artists to debates on ethics, privacy, and philosophy as they relate to immersive media writ large. Notably, Voices of VR serves as a snapshot of the most significant projects released in a given year, thereby serving as a living archive of projects which most people might never get to see because of ongoing issues with distribution. Voices of VR is a must-listen for anyone invested in this field, making it a priority for us to include Bye's perspective in this volume.

Keywords: extended reality, immersive media, Voices of VR, processrelational philosophy

For many avid listeners, myself included, you have become a key figure in collecting oral histories and recording the development of this nascent field of immersive media. How did you find yourself working on this topic? More specifically, what led you to undertake this work of documenting VR and immersive media?

Kent Bye (KB): Back in high school, I had an interest in working on film and media projects, but I was also very apt in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Even though I initially opted to go the engineering route, my career has always straddled this dialectic between art and science.

For example, I was active in the very early phases of videoblogging (before even YouTube had launched), documenting the media's coverage of the war in Iraq for a documentary called the Echo Chamber Project. I ended up talking to a lot of journalists, which allowed me to understand what the limitations of journalism were at the time in terms of having to reduce complex events down into a story as opposed to sharing unfiltered information. That's when I started doing more podcasts. I would go to different conferences and just interview people. I found that I was able to understand what was happening within these very technical communities simply by doing over forty interviews.