VR Vienna presents: Imagine

Event Details

Virtual Reality Meetup #3: Filmmakers and cinephiles, you’re going to LOVE this edition of VRVienna!

Our relationship with moving images is changing. Thanks to virtual reality, we are transitioning from passive observers to active explorers standing in the middle of all the action. Now we are in control.

What would this change mean for the future of filmmaking? No one really knows yet, but there’s only one thing for sure: the new rules of the game and tools of the trade will take us to places where the border between realities is thin, if existing at all. How can we be prepare ourselves for this change?

Together with the Filmakademie Vienna and the Study of Digital Art Compositing, this month’s VRVienna will bring you closer to the world of VR with a special focus on Filmmaking.

Speakers and topics

This month’s VRVienna speakers will invite you to imagine the future of VR and its relationship with filmmaking through the looking glass of their VR projects, research and theories. Are you ready for what is to come?

Imagine a day in the life of a VR producer: Axel Dietrich is the founder of VRisch, a VR production company in Vienna. Since 2009 he has been creating content for VR projects in marketing, documentaries and art. In addition, since 2002 he has been involved in the film and advertising industry as a VFX/Motion Graphics artist in Vienna, Munich and Barcelona for clients such as Red Bull, AMA, Royal Caribbean, Novartis and SEAT.

At this edition of VRVienna, Axel will share with us some of the pleasures and sorrows of working as a VR producer, the daily struggle to keep one foot on the tech and the other one on the art, the quest for finding the balance between what we want to see happening and what the audience will perceive, and our responsibility as creators to shape the future of what is to come.

Imagine a Holodeck: Hannes Kaufmann is head of the Virtual and Augmented Reality group at TU Wien. He developed the first augmented reality application for geometry education in 2004, published more than 85 scientific articles and managed over 20 research projects. Together with his team of 3 PostDoc and 4 PhD students he is working on innovative VR and AR applications, real time ray-tracing for AR, Holodeck technologies, 3D interaction and haptic feedback.

At this edition of VRVienna, Hannes will present his group’s work on ImmersiveDeck, a multi-user large scale Holodeck, and various experiments that have been conducted with this platform.

Imagine a bigger and more significant VR: Dr. Thomas Hohstadt, a Senior Lecturer in the University of Texas system, was the first to develop an online course for Virtual Reality as a language and as an art-form. In his two recent books, The Age of Virtual Reality and Film Music, he shows the integral relationship of these two fields.

At this edition of VRVienna, Dr. Hohstadt will lead a provocative deep dive into the nature of media, felt meaning, and our relationship to both. He sees Virtual Reality as the first intellectual discipline that permits the active use of the body in the search for knowledge. He reminds us, at the same time, that VR is impossible without emotions, feelings, and senses. As a result of this historic moment, our body has become part of our “thinking” even while our educational institutions remain thoroughly wedded to the logic of the ancient Greeks.

Experience corner

Still searching for an opportunity to try out some VR? Come to the event and have fun trying it out at our experience corner, where Michael Tisler, Stefan Krastev, and Markus W. Redl will be there to answer all your questions. You can’t be in better hands for this! Curious? Excited? Both?