Help Is On the Way
Writer/Director
A 6 degrees-of-freedom VR thriller, in which a woman walking alone at night gets the feeling she’s being watched. What she finds on her trail is stranger than one would imagine.
Help Is On the Way is an attempt to maximize use of suspense techniques in a VR setting, and switches the viewer’s POV between the voyeur and their victim. An exercise in using virtual production techniques and Unreal Engine to combine live-action characters into a cinematic, fully 3D world.
An early teaser for the film shown here, as recorded from a VR headset.
The Great World Zoo
Writer/Director — in collaboration with Michael Wahba and Brendan Hutchins
A six minute, 6 degrees-of-freedom VR film made entirely with neural radiance fields. Documents the strange, dark, and surreal history of LA’s Griffith Park Zoo.
A short reel of images from the film shown here.
The Night Watcher
Writer/Director — in collaboration with Seleny Xie
The Night Watcher is a ten minute, 6 degrees-of-freedom VR film, using virtual production techniques and Unreal Engine to combine live-action characters into a cinematic 3D world. The Night Watcher is the story of Mina, a loyal but curious girl who follows her grandfather into the most forbidden part of their village to bring him home safe. In the process, she uncovers a dark secret at the heart of her town.
The film is an experiment in virtual production for VR, where a physical performer is fully integrated into the 3D world of Unreal to tell a story.
A short reel of images from the film shown here, as recorded from a VR headset.
The Immersive Archive | immersivearchive.org
Student Lead
The Immersive Archive is an initiative of USC's Mobile and Environmental Media Lab to restore the landmark VR and AR work of past decades.
Early restoration work has included restoring the work of VR's first practioner, Mort Heilig:
- Photogrammetrically capturing the first device in the history of VR, Mort Heilig's Sensorama.
- Restoring the original left- and right-eye film strips of his stereo films made for the device.
- Recreating the audio-visual experience in stereo in VR.
And for the early AR work of Ivan Sutherland:
- Photogrammetrically scanning Sutherland's head-mounted display (HMD), the first device of its kind.
- Modeling the Harvard graphics lab in which Sutherland's pioneering work was conducted.
- Re-creating the vector graphics experience seen through the headset, the world's first experience of augmented reality.
Publicly debuted at SIGGRAPH 2023. Short excerpts of original Sensorama films shown here, as recorded from a VR headset.
Color Wheel
Director/Designer
An immersive virtual reality painting unfolding across time. The piece is also an image generator: each frame overlays every other image frame, outputting all combinatorial possibilities of the images inputted. The length of the piece grows exponentially with the number of images inputted.
Short excerpt of piece shown here as recorded from VR headset.
Flight Test
Director/Designer
A hand-painted immersive VR landscape that pulls the viewer through its imagery. Animation
intended to make the viewer feel they are in motion, traveling sequentially through its worlds.
Short excerpt of piece shown here, as recorded from VR headset.