Industrial Light & Magic wants to bring virtual reality to the movies
ILM's Experience Lab, or ILMxLab, will combine the technical assets of ILM, Skywalker Sound and Lucasfilm to create immersive experiences that allow fans to participate in their favorite movie worlds.
Although video games pegged to movies have promised a similar experience, this new tech will be different: non-competitive and using photo-realism rather than animation.
The division's debut products will be Star Wars-based and debut later this year. The company is also working with other filmmakers to bring their projects into the virtual space. Disney, which bought Lucasfilm in 2013 for $3 billion, may use the resulting assets for everything from marketing to theme park attractions.
Enter ILMxLab, which is testing a variety of iPad- and Oculus Rift-based technology that allows movie aficionados to enter specific scenes of a movie and navigate through them at will. ILMxLab executives say the tech is most likely to make its debut in association with J.J. Abrams' Star Wars: The Force Awakens in December.
"What we're aiming for is to open the two-dimensional world of the movies and allow fans to walk into those worlds with the same visual fidelity," says John Gaeta, ILMxLab's creative director.
In an exclusive demo for USA TODAY, Gaeta fired up a Star Wars-inspired scene where R2D2 and C-3PO are hiding from Storm Troopers in a dusty village. Instead of just watching the scene on a screen, a visitor holding an iPad can turn 360-degrees and see all around the main characters' world.
The difference between a video game and ILMxLab's world are immediately apparent. Rather than the goal being beating a rival, the end game is to put the viewer inside the movie in order to explore story lines perhaps not pursued by the director in the feature film itself.
"Apple, Google, Intel, they all have moonshot projects around AR and VR, but they're still just figuring it out," Gaeta says. "Our standards for world-building are very high, and we intend to use our technology to give people experiences that they haven't yet dreamed of."
See the full story here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/06/12/ilm-creates-xlab-for-bring-virtual-reality-to-movie-experience/71064884/