Chris Milk is an American entrepreneur, innovator, director, photographer, and immersive artist. He is co-founder and CEO of Within, a virtual reality technology company, and co-founder of Here Be Dragons, a virtual reality production company. Milk began his career directing music videos and commercials for leading artists and brands, and in subsequent years became best known for bridging the gap between emerging technologies and new mediums for storytelling.
Dekker Dreyer is an American multi-disciplinary artist working in film, visual art, and music also known as Phantom Astronaut. He is a prominent artist in virtual and augmented reality.
Sundance Institute is a non-profit organization founded by Robert Redford committed to the growth of independent artists. The institute is driven by its programs that discover and support independent filmmakers, theatre artists and composers from all over the world. At the core of the programs is the goal to introduce audiences to the artists' new work, aided by the institute's labs, granting and mentorship programs that take place throughout the year in the United States and internationally.
Bryn Mooser is a filmmaker and entrepreneur. In 2012, Mooser co-founded RYOT, a media company specializing in documentary film, virtual/augmented reality and branded content. Over his career, he has produced more than 200 linear and immersive films garnering multiple Emmy Awards, two Oscar nominations, a Peabody and a Cannes Lion. Mooser sold RYOT to Verizon in 2016, becoming a senior vice president and helping create the roadmap for immersive and documentary films for AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon. While at Verizon, Mooser built the branded content studio for AOL/Yahoo, HuffPost and Tumblr.
Nonny de la Peña is an American journalist, documentary filmmaker, and entrepreneur.
Zach Richter is an American director, creative director and designer, best known for his work in virtual reality and interactive media.
Founded in 2014, 8i is a volumetric video company specializing in the capture, transformation, and streaming of real human holograms, on any device, for the Metaverse.
Dražen Bošnjak is a composer and sound designer based in New York City. He founded Q Department, Mach1, and Department of Records. He has created soundtracks and sound design for a number of films, television shows, video games, advertisements, and more recently, virtual reality projects.
Within Unlimited, Inc, or commonly Within, is a studio based in Los Angeles developing the VR fitness service Supernatural on Meta Quest. The company was founded by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin in 2014 and initially created, acquired, and distributed 360-degree video, AR, and VR experiences across web, mobile, console, and headsets. The company was acquired by Meta Platforms in February 2023.
Survios is an American virtual reality game developer and software publisher based in Los Angeles, California. The company develops virtual reality software and games, including the titles Raw Data and Sprint Vector. Survios was created by graduates from the University of Southern California's Mixed Reality Lab, where they worked together on Project Holodeck. The company has raised over $54 million in venture funding led by Shasta Ventures, Lux Capital and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
FoxNext, LLC was a virtual reality and theme park unit of 20th Century Fox, now known as 20th Century Studios. It was established in 2017 prior to Disney's acquisition of Fox and operated under the Disney Parks, Experiences and Products unit of The Walt Disney Company. It handled the development and publishing of virtual reality and augmented reality titles, as well as the development of 20th Century Studios's theme and amusement parks. The division's president was Salil Mehta, a former executive from NBCUniversal and The Walt Disney Company, who has been with Fox since 2013 who later returned to Disney after Disney acquired Fox in 2019 until on January 23, 2020, when the company was sold to Scopely.
The Fox Innovation Lab was Twentieth Century Fox's research and development center, located in Los Angeles. Working across all film and television divisions, the lab was created in 2014 as a hub for Fox's short- and long-term projects aimed at producing new consumer technologies and experiences. Hanno Basse, CTO, Twentieth Century Fox and Danny Kaye, Executive Vice President, global research and technology strategy, co-managed the Lab. In March 2019, Fox was acquired by Disney, and Fox laid off about 4,000 employees, including both Basse and Kaye.
David Karlak is a Mexican-American director and writer, known for short films, The Candidate and Rise.
Ramiro Lopez Dau is a director and animator of feature films and virtual reality.
Dreamscape Immersive is an American entertainment and technology company. It creates story-based full-roam virtual reality (VR) experiences which allow up to six people to simultaneously explore a virtual 3D environment, seeing fully rendered avatars of one another. Using real-time motion capture technology, full body mapping, virtual reality headsets, and real-life room-scale stage sets, it enables users to move untethered in a virtual environment and interact with physical objects. The technology was created by Caecilia Charbonnier and Sylvain Chagué, and developed by engineers at Artanim, a Swiss research center specialized in motion-capture technologies.
Sansar is a social virtual reality platform, for Microsoft Windows only, developed by the San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab, and now owned by Sansar Inc. It launched in “creator beta” to the general public on July 31, 2017. The platform enables user-created 3D spaces where people can create and share interactive social experiences, such as playing games, watching videos, and having conversations in VR. Each participant is represented by a detailed avatar that is the graphical representation of the user including speech-driven facial animations and motion-driven body animations.
Spheres: Songs of Spacetime is a three-part virtual reality (VR) experience created by Eliza McNitt and produced by Darren Aronofsky that takes the viewer on a journey through space and the sounds that can be heard there. It was notably the first known VR product to secure a seven figure deal coming out of a film festival, namely Sundance, provoking significant media interest in the state of the VR film industry.
Eliza McNitt is an American writer and director who specializes in blending science with art. In 2018 she was an Emmy Awards finalist and Grand Prize winner for the VR category at the Venice Film Festival. Other festivals that have exhibited her work includes SXSW, AFI Fest, Cannes NEXT, Tribeca, Telluride, and Sundance, where McNitt secured the first seven figure deal in VR film festival history for her project SPHERES.
TheBlu is a digital media franchise that utilizes virtual reality technology to create 3D-rendered, interactive simulations of underwater environments in the world's oceans. Iterations of TheBlu have appeared as applications for the Samsung Gear VR and HTC Vive headsets and on the Steam and Oculus stores. In 2018, the most recent project in the franchise was launched using the Dreamscape Immersive platform, allowing up to six users to engage in a location-based experience. TheBlu was initially released as an interactive web application and screensaver by Wevr in 2011.
Denis Semionov - is a Russian new media artist.
