Jessica Brillhart shows us what it's like to be an immersive VR director
Jessica Brillhart comes from a traditional film background, but was frustated by the restraints it imposed on her. She started doing VR films to unlock her whole potential and has since done several groundbreaking projects, including an AR piece on the importance and history of the LA river.
Video Transcript
JESSICA BRILLHART: Technology isn't just there to be dealt with. The technology is there to help us understand ourselves and to create and explore how we exist together. What does it mean to craft great experiences, impactful experiences?
How do we create something in the virtual space that actually helps in the real one?
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JESSICA BRILLHART: I'm Jessica Brillhart. I am the director of the Mixed Reality Lab here at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies. And I'm also the co-founder of a company called Vrai Pictures. I come from filmmaking traditionally. I make films and documentaries and so on.
I wasn't unhappy. But it definitely felt like there was more to what my brain wanted to do that was being allowed for in the medium I was in. I was more about allowing some room for the audience to tell their own stories.
Immersive is interesting because things like virtual reality, augmented reality, immersive audio. These technologies are happening practically in real time. And you have to have the creative and technological components working together, designing for better experiences. That kind of media invites you in.
So some projects I've been working on include a really great platform for education called the LA River AR platform. And it's taking something called the LA River Index, which is a website with all sorts of awesome data about the LA river and presenting it in a way that visualizes it so that the public can understand what the LA river actually is.
So actually, what we did is pretty cool. We created a table that has the topography of the LA river on it. And when you launch it, it gives you a bit of a description. And then it maps the AR version of LA, our platform on top of that table. And what it does is it takes you all the way back to the beginning.
You get to see how the LA river actually formed. So you see basically the evolution of just the communities, urban development. And you can actually see LA differently. This is LA based on population. This is LA based on pollution, all based on data that was collected about the river. So it's this idea that this river helps us reimagine LA and understand Los Angeles in a completely new way.
This is something that I thought was really cool. You slide it onto your tablet. What it allows for you to do is you see-- it lets you actually look at content on one half of the screen. And then you can duck in to VR [INAUDIBLE] serve a 360 content. So you feel like there's something here for both helping teachers be able to teach more complicated concepts and visualize more complicated things while also giving students something that can hold all of their lesson plans in one place.
So there's a whole ecosystem just by creating this. We're not done building this stuff yet. And I think that's going to be important as we move forward to really think about the content and the requests and limitations that various people have with this stuff and make sure that we build better hardware as a result.
I think a lot of what Immersive can do is challenge the way that we experience the real world. We have the capacity to change and shift our relationship with time and space. We can create buildings we've never built before.
We can add layers of context and information in a really beautiful way that reimagines spaces that we're in at that time. One of the things I get really excited about with this space, too, is that it's almost like evolving technology to remind us what it's like to exist. The future is based upon how we deal with that intersection.
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