Pixar and Bungie alum unveils Limitless, a virtual reality character creation platform
You’re in an ancient, booby-trapped Peruvian temple, standing next to Indiana Jones. He wiggles his fingers, licks his lips, and prepares to ever-so-carefully replace a gold figurine with a sandbag. Just before the switch, he turns to you and asks if you’re ready — and when you answer, he actually understands what you’ve said and responds back.
This interactive character experience is the future being created by Limitless founder and CEO Tom Sanocki. The Seattle-based virtual reality company has created a platform for content creators to design characters that can respond to VR users’ speech and body language in real time, which runs on all existing VR headsets by major manufacturers.
Sanocki approaches the virtual reality market from a unique perspective, as an alum of both film company Pixar and game company Bungie, where he led character design teams. During his 11 years at Pixar, he was behind characters like Kevin the bird from the movie Up and Mater from Cars. After Pixar, Sanocki moved to Bungie, where he worked for nearly 4 years on real-time characters for the game Destiny.
Limitless will debut its technology next week at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, along with a VR experience produced on its platform by the company’s first publicly-announced customer, the VR film company Motional.
“Just like we saw with YouTube and Twitch, we don’t know what people will do with new technology until they actually do something with it,” Sanocki said.
While Limitless provides the character technology, users do all the storytelling, including script writing, acting, and animation. That’s how Motional’s VR experience,”Gary the Gull,” worked. Motional, whose CEO Mark Walsh is another Pixar alum, wrote a story about a seagull that chats you up on the beach in an attempt to snag your snacks. Gary the Gull asks questions and, using Limitless technology, understands user responses, reacting based on a preset script, depending on what users say and do.
Limitless currently shares space in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood with Pluto VR, the virtual reality company started in part by PopCap co-founder John Vechey.
See the full story here: http://www.geekwire.com/2016/limitless-a-platform-to-create-interactive-characters-to-debut-at-gdc/