Introduction

Virtual Reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are at the center of the tech-entertainment convergence, attracting billions in venture capital and producing near-hysterical levels of expectation. In spite of the new excitement and attention, the people innovating in these fields remain largely unknown unknown to those in traditional showbiz circles and the public at large. With this in mind, we shine the Variety spotlight on 10 VR Innovators to Watch. These are VR and AR pros who are not just pushing the boundaries of gaming and storytelling, but also creating new software tolls that will change the way people work and live. 

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Dell, which provides computers that drive VR experiences, will continue its support of VR innovation and entrepreneurship by hosting a Facebook Live stream with Variety on Thursday, September 7th at 2:50PM at Variety’s Entertainment & Technology Summit. 

The panel conversation Tipping Point: Innovating VR for All, Powered by Dell” will feature Gary Radburn, head of VR/AR, Dell, Chris Heatherly, EVP Games & Digital Platforms, NBC Universal, Brendan Handler, GM, FoxNext VR Studio, 20th Century Fox, Colum Slevin, Head of Experiences, Facebook’s Oculus VR, and Vicki Dobbs Beck, Head of Lucasfilm’s ILMxLab.

Mariana Acuna Acosta

Co-founder and chief product officer, Opaque Studios

At Opaque, Acuña-Acosta is putting VR to work for film and TV pros with game engine plug-ins that let them strap on headsets and collaborate in the virtual worlds they’re creating in real time. “There’s a lot of waste in vfx because you’re not able to visualize and then make decisions on the fly,” says Acuña-Acosta, a native of Mexico who spent more than a decade as a digital compositor, compiling a list of credits that includes the films “Zodiac” and “Green Lantern” and the TV series “Lost.” With Opaque’s plug-ins, “we’re giving directors the same workflow they’d have on a live-action set,” enabling them to relight and redress virtual sets and direct from facial captures within the VR environment.

Gil Baron

Co-founder/CEO, Mindshow

Baron made a splash at VRLA in April with a demo of Mindshow, his company’s self-titled application that empowers users to easily create and share animated VR narratives using a broad template of characters and settings. “We got into VR wanting to tell stories, and we realized there were no tools to make stories in VR, so we started building them ourselves,” says Baron. When he abandoned the visual effect business — where he racked up more than 400 commercial and film credits (including “The Matrix”) — to launch Mindshow (originally named Visionary VR) in his garage three-and-a-half years ago, “everyone probably thought I was crazy,” he says. But Mindshow has already proven to be a hit in closed alpha, scoring millions of views on YouTube and Facebook with 2D versions of users’ creations, and this fall it will be released to the public as a free app.

Vince Cacace

Founder/CEO, Vertebrae

Last fall, Vertebrae launched software for native ad insertions in VR environments that has attracted a wealth of high-profile clients (Amgen, Disney, the Dallas Mavericks, Lionsgate, Taco Bell) and helped address one of immersive video’s peskiest challenges: monetization. Cacace’s innovations have attracted $10 million Series A funding for Vertebrae and earned it a spot in HTC’s Vive X accelerator program. Now, his Santa Monica-based start-up is gearing up to launch a headset-agnostic software development kit for Apple’s ARKit creation tool for iPhone and iPad for iOS 11. “We have a lean, hungry, riding-on-the-rails mentality,” says Cacace, who founded Vertebrae in 2015 following a stint as a data analyst for GM in Texas. “The long-term goal for Vertebrae is to be the monetization platform for immersive media. But in the short-term what that means is powering 360-video and augmented reality ads over the web.”

Eugene Chung

Founder and CEO, Penrose Studios

Penrose’s dedication to creating groundbreaking immersive content, as well as the tools to make it, has led some to call it “the Pixar of VR.” It makes sense given that Chung worked in production at Pixar between stints as a venture capitalist and an independent filmmaker (the documentary “Divided Families”) and served as head of film and media at Oculus Story Studio, co-founded by Pixar alums. Since leaving Oculus to launch Penrose in 2015, he has premiered two well-received VR shorts (“The Rose and I,” “Allumette”) and previewed another (“Arden’s Wake”), the latter of which employed its new software tool Maestro, which enables VR creators to collaborate remotely inside a fully virtual space. It’s also developing projects for AR. “We think that it’s a new art form,” says Chung, the son of an accountant and an opera singer, “and we’re on a mission to define what the next generation of storytelling will look like.”

Jikhan Jung

Founder and CEO, Subdream Studios

Spun off from Japanese mobile game publisher Colopl in the fall of 2016, the San Mateo, Calif.-based Subdream has already produced a pair of well-received VR games, “Mega Overload” and “Kingdom Watcher,” and has three more set for release later this year. “As of today, there aren’t a lot of single player [VR] games on the market, because it’s at an early stage, but as the market matures, social gaming will definitely be the hit thing,” says the South Korean-born Jung, who previously spent eight years heading up the North American subsidy of Japanese online gaming company Gala-Net. For the next two years, Subdream plans to concentrate its social focus on VR arcade games. “The game has to be easy enough to play and have a good reason why it’s in VR, so when they come to the video arcade with their friends, they can play it together,” explains Jung.

Sally-Anne Kellaway

Creative Director, Ossic

While most have focused on the visual aspects of VR and AR, Kellaway has traveled the world preaching about its aural potential at game conferences. After stints as a senior audio designer for Melbourne-based VR developer Zero Latency and a sound supervisor for the Uku 360° underwater VR documentary series in her native Australia, she landed at Ossic in San Diego in February to lead the team developing content to showcase the Ossic X 3D Audio Headphones. “I get to do so many things I’m passionate about at Ossic — make content, do sound design and write a little bit of music,” says Kellaway, who is still active as the founder of the Virtual Reality Content Creators of Australia. “I also get to inform [the company] on what developers actually want and need, which is important, because I don’t believe content creators should just be given tools and told to figure it out.”

Philippe Lewicki

Captain, AfterNow

The virtual Easter egg hunt that AfterNow staged at VRLA in April is just the tip of a project slate Lewicki has been developing for Microsoft’s HoloLens AR glasses that also includes apps for spatial audio mixing, holographic restaurant menus and lighting color control. His team created AfterNow’s first AR setup with off-the-shelf parts, and their tests caught the attention of Microsoft, which invited the company to participate in its HoloLens Agency Readiness Program. “We’re at the beginning of a new computing era where the way we interact with machines is going to be radically different. Eventually, all the things we have on flat 2D screens will be totally merged with our real world,” says the French-born, Africa-reared Lewicki, who goes by the title “captain” at AfterNow because “for a 15-employee company, CEO doesn’t make sense.” AfterNow is currently prepping the release of an AR app for directors and DPs.

Joel Ogden

Co-founder, CEO and creative director, Construct Studio

Odgen’s Construct came out of the gate quickly last fall with “The Price of Freedom,” a bilingual (English and Mandarin) VR experience that turns users into subjects of hallucinogen abuse at the hands of CIA’s notorious Project MK Ultra. A veteran of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division who served in Afghanistan, Ogden formed the start-up in July 2016 with Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center grad school classmates Chuck Tsung-Han Lee and Amy Stewart, who collaborated with him on the student VR project “Imago.” Now based in San Francisco, the company — which recently landed a spot in HTC’s Vive X VR accelerator program — has also developed Vera, a software solution that enables users to build VR/AR environments from drag-and-drop templates. “Right now, everybody has a slightly different set-up, so we’re standardizing workflow and making it user-friendly enough where people can make a model very quickly and share it with others,” says Ogden.

Cathy Twigg

Co-founder and Chief Production Officer, The Rogue Initiative

A veteran of DreamWorks Animation and Sony Television, Twigg combined her Hollywood storytelling and production expertise with the video game industry chops of her husband Pete Blumel (“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare”) to launch The Rogue Initiative in early 2016. With an impressive list of stakeholders, including director Michael Bay, and a healthy slate of projects, both completed (VR game “Crowe: The Drowned Armory”) and in-development, Rogue’s looking to branch out into location-based immersive experiences. Notes Twigg, whose credits include “Kung Fu Panda,” “even though we’re looking for character-and-story-driven projects, they need to work in that 360 environment.”

Armand Weeresinghe

Lead Producer, Red Pill VR

Weeresinghe’s not-so-modest mission at Red Pill is to revolutionize VR and open up new opportunities for the beleaguered music industry. “A lot of the economic model for musicians now is focused on touring, and it’s not scalable or sustainable for the artist,” observes Weeresinghe. Founded by VR vet Laurent Scallie, Red Pill aims to change that with new technologies, giving users the ability to play along and interact socially with other fans. To create those experiences, Red Pill brought in Weeresinghe, who spent a decade producing vfx and 2D and 3D animation for music videos and brands. At CES in January, Red Pill premiered “Formosa,” a proof of concept for Audio Lifeform, its audio-reactive real-time musical visualization experience. Next up: a VR project with music legend Quincy Jones.