Veterans of the film animation and computer gaming industry are coming together to create content for the new medium that virtual reality provides. A VR experience from Baobab Studios Inc., a VR animation technology company, allows users to not only be immersed in a new environment, but also interact with characters and storylines.

“For us, the thing that’s most exciting is that by you being a character, first of all, the other characters are not just able to have … high-quality animation, but they’re able to react to you,” said Larry Cutler (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer at Baobab Studios.

Cutler spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco. They talked about the team behind Baobab’s innovation and their approach to creating an immersive, interactive experience.

A new medium for storytelling

The Baobab team is made up of animation and gaming industry veterans excited to apply their storytelling expertise in a new environment. The team needs to operate as lean as possible to create a cost efficient pipeline for new content creation.

“We wanted to take all the experience that we have telling stories at places like Pixar and DreamWorks and apply that into this new medium. And so we found that VR is an incredibly powerful medium,” Cutler said. 

Even with the veteran team in place, there are several technological hurdles that must be crossed to deliver a truly immersive and responsive experience at the frame rate and character quality that consumers have come to expect. The company has begun to scratch the surface on finer details that help tell a more vivid story in VR.

“So one of the things that’s really interesting is how two people will actually have all these subconscious communication cues. … And, at the same time, we have stories where depending on what you do … that actually affects the outcome and affects the way that characters respond to you,” Cutler concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Samsung Developer Conference.

Photo: SiliconANGLE