At SXSW, fimmaker Brillhart attacks 'uncharted territories' of VR, AR

Tuesday's convergence keynote presentation at South by Southwest featuring filmmaker and virtual reality/augmented reality explorer Jessica Brillhart contained all the welcome complexities of a good SXSW session.

Brillhart is equal parts filmmaker and technology innovator, working on projects that these days fall under the label of "immersive," a broad swath that can include VR, mixed reality and even spatial audio to create experiences.

What was most welcome about the session was that Brillhart seems determined to use her talents to create very human experiences. And she's not afraid to fail or to detail to a huge audience of SXSW attendees what hasn't worked along the way.

Brillhart has worked with Google on projects and of late has been busy starting a company, Vrai pictures, to continue exploring.

Last year, Brillhart brought "Beethoven's Fifth" to SXSW's Virtual Cinema, a VR shared experience that was created not just as a symphonic music installation, but as a way for the deaf to experience a performance as well. Brillhart detailed how having deafness considered from the start of the project significantly changed the scope of the project.

"We had people showing up saying that for the first time, it was a virtual-reality experience made for them. They weren't an afterthought," she said. More so, people who weren't deaf were taking off their headphones to experience what they were missing.

"This has great potential," Brillhart said. "If we actually build our experiences from the get-go with this in mind, we can build more amazing experiences better than we ever thought we could."a

This year, Brillhart has been working on a spatial-audio project called Traverse in partnership with Bose that is being demonstrated at the Virtual Cinema in the JW Marriott. "From Elvis in Memphis," which launches with the Traverse app this week, allows listeners to experience a virtual audio space of Elvis Presley recordings.

Even demonstrated in the cavernous Room 18ABCD space of the Austin Convention Center, the audio was impressive; the different parts of the audio were clearly differentiated with movement, giving the song "Suspicious Minds" a different shape and context.

Brillhart's talk largely focused on not getting too caught up in the technology of it all or trying to hold on to the conventions of filmmaking. It won't all work, things will break, some projects will be complete failures.

But that's all part of exploring and experimenting, she said.

VR headsets haven't taken off because they're clunky, hard to use and not in their final form, she said. But that doesn't mean the medium isn't full of possibilities.

"The systems in place are trying to keep something contained that should be constantly evolving," she said. "Immersive cannot be contained. What we should fear the most isn't disruption, it's thinking things will always stay the same. No matter what the old guard says, our generation gets this stuff."

What's next for Brillhart? She made a soft announcement of a project she's working on called "Into the Mind" that will work to reimaging the biopic format in VR. She's partnered with Cyan, the makers of "Myst" and Numinous Games, the creators of past SXSW standout "That Dragon, Cancer."

"We're just going to go for it," she said. "Whatever technology is there, we'll bring in. What are the uncharted territories? I have some of the best people to help me figure that out."