Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the Arts
The Media + Emerging Technology Lab (METL) is situated within the film school of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and they have a couple of 6-month immersive storytelling residency programs coming up in 2020.
I talk with METL Director Ryan Schmaltz to get more context on these three initial positions that has a submission deadline of January 15th. But we also talk about their interdisciplinary approach to teaching film and art students how to start working with immersive technologies, spatial storytelling, and the intersection between enterprise training and art. Schmaltz comes from an engineering and business background, and so he’s been focused on cultivating collaborations and immersive experiences within different medical & enterprise contexts. He also talks about their focus on social equity, economic development, outreach and literacy to the local community in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Robust distribution options for immersive storytelling experiences stills needs to be fully figured out, but UNCSA’s METL is committed to experimenting with supporting artists through this residency program to continue to push innovation in the forms of immersive storytelling, explore new options for promotion of this type of work, and continue to build ties to the broader immersive industry as they continue to develop their curriculum to train the next generation of immersive storytellers.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So in today's episode, I feature Ryan Smaltz. He's the director of the Media and Emerging Technology Lab there at the UNC School of the Arts. So Ryan is coming in and helping to kickstart the immersive storytelling program there at this film school in Winston-Salem. And Ryan actually brought me out to Winston-Salem back in 2018 to help moderate this whole future of reality summit. They had this day long conference with all these industry leaders. But Ryan actually reached out to me because he wanted to sponsor a podcast episode in order to get the word out for this specific immersive storytelling residency program that they're having. So it's basically a six month program where you can go to North Carolina and they're actually been funding three separate positions. They're all going to be collaborating to create this immersive storytelling experience. So we wanted to kind of just talk about that, but also I wanted to just kind of dive into what the scene is like there in Winston-Salem and what is happening with the backstory and the context for some of these colleges. How do you actually train people to be able to create immersive experiences and just how they're collaborating with different industry partners and trying to find this connection between enterprise training and storytelling? And so we're talking about all the different initiatives that they're doing there at UNC School of the Arts as well. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Ryan happened on Monday, December 16th, 2019, while I was in Portland, Oregon, and Ryan was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:46.288] Ryan Schmaltz: My name is Ryan Schmaltz. I'm the director of the Media and Emerging Technology Lab. We're located at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts at the School of Filmmaking. And really what we're focused on is using emerging technologies for the purposes of storytelling and content creation. And that includes virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, computer vision, volumetric capture. And we have a pretty robust Wicon motion capture system set up here. That's one of the leading motion capture systems in the Southeast region.
[00:02:13.763] Kent Bye: Great. So maybe you could give me a bit more context as to your background and your journey into VR.
[00:02:19.898] Ryan Schmaltz: Yeah, so I started my career doing intellectual property design and enforcement at Deloitte. And then after a series of jumps at Microsoft and Adobe, I found myself as an early employee at Uber tasked with driving growth and scale at that organization, getting us from the early days to being able to launch in cities all over the world. And I was contemplating the next move after Uber. I was trying to figure out what could be bigger and more interesting than press a button and a car comes because that alone was super exciting and interesting and very tangible from the standpoint of getting to interface with my customers each and every day. And then through a fortuitous meeting at Mobile World Congress, I discovered augmented reality, or as I thought of it at that time, the internet in the physical world, and was just really captivated with this notion of screens going away and being able to leverage the physical world around a subject or a person to deliver contextual internet and allowing people to sort of lift their heads up instead of being hunched over looking at a screen and seeing information, gaming, education, entertainment, all sort of flowing with them depending on where they are, what they're doing and who they are. And that led me to join Blipper, at that time, the most well-funded augmented reality company in the world based in the UK. And there I helped transition that business from an agency model of doing bespoke campaigns for large brands to building out a end-to-end platform to really democratize the ability to create AR content with our tools like Blipp Builder, which was a WYSIWYG design tool, and then also through APIs and SDKs. Blipper ran into some fundraising issues and had to let my team go and wind down the San Francisco office. And the opportunity presented itself to really look at the other side of the spectrum of really applying the technology as opposed to developing it. And that's why I found myself here at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and really taking the charge of really trying to figure out what role immersive technology could play in the filmmaking process. And when I think of film, I think of it as this art form that's enabled through technology. And I see virtual reality and immersive technology in general, as a way to add a couple more colors in the palette of what a filmmaker can paint with as they're creating new and exciting content.
[00:04:36.818] Kent Bye: Yeah, for me, it's exciting to see virtual reality start to go out into different art schools like the UNC School of the Arts, just because the medium is so nascent in the sense that you are really pulling in from so many different disciplines and domains and For me, what's interesting about you and your background is that you are coming from more of this engineering, pragmatic, applied sciences type of approach, but then now you're at the UNC School of the Arts, surrounded by all these artists who are maybe looking at it through a different lens, which is more of, you know, how can you tell stories? How can you express yourself? maybe learn from all these other mediums like film and the cinematic language of film and theater production. So yeah, maybe you could just talk a bit about the context there at UNC School of the Arts, because you do have quite an interesting blend of lots of different disciplines and domains that are there with their own lenses for how to look at how to create experiences and different entertainment, but how that is being all fused together into the realm of VR.
[00:05:35.901] Ryan Schmaltz: Yeah, it's funny you say that because it's a lot of fun, to be honest. Going from attending CES and Mobile World Congress to now attending Sundance Film Festival in Tribeca and sort of shifting to the other side of the coin, so to speak. Yeah, I think for me it really came down to the realization at Blipper that we kept building a bunch of tech that the market really wasn't ready for. And so, you know, in the last few years at Blipper, what we were finding is that people were still getting excited about the things we had built in 2015. And so in many ways, we were building out different tech components really for our own benefit, because we were getting a bit bored of the things that were already out there. And so shifting gears and looking at through this new lens of content creation and applying the tech has been really an eye opener for me personally. And here at the school, I think what we find here is that it's an interesting mix where we have a fully functioning backlog and students are really coming in with their minds really set on becoming the next great independent filmmaker. And what we're offering them is this sort of perspective to think about things and how they're evolving In this method of storytelling where game engines and sort of a technical vernacular starts to play into the equation. And how that technical vernacular needs to sort of seamlessly work in the pre production and production processes and how artists need to start empathizing with the technical engineers that are. really working in game engines doing 3d character development and vice versa and those technical engineers and technical artists need to really sort of empathize with the artist himself and so it's really sort of shaking things up a bit over here which we're really excited about because they're now looking at this in a whole new way and oftentimes in my speeches here on campus, I often say, hey, look, we know who Francis Ford Coppola is. We know who Sofia Coppola is. We know who who Steven Spielberg is and all the great filmmakers in that lineage that has come before. But when it comes to immersive storytelling in virtual reality or augmented reality or some other medium, like projection mapping, is a complete blank slate, a blank canvas where we don't know who those people are. We don't know who those innovators are who have mastered or who are going to master this art of storytelling. in this new medium. And things like creating agency and leveraging the three dimensional space offer so much potential that's never been present until now.
[00:07:58.621] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I think it's certainly in terms of a blank slate of public awareness. That's certainly true. But I would I would say that there's certainly innovators and people that are already starting to do that and starting to write that history of the evolution of spatial computing. But You know, I think it's fair to say in the larger awareness of people like Francis Ford Coppola or Steven Spielberg or whoever it is, Stanley Kubrick that you're pointing to as these big innovators. But yeah, I think that over time, the distribution I think is probably the biggest thing holding back VR because. you and I go to a lot of these festivals and conferences that have a lot of this work that's out there. It just doesn't have the distribution to be able to have that public awareness. But I think certainly those conversations are happening. And I think that's part of what you're doing there at UNC School of the Arts is to really help try to fuse together those different perspectives of looking at the different film traditions and, you know, taking these different insights and, but also gaming and interactivity and all this stuff that And for me, it does feel like this open-ended fusion of all these existing disciplines and domains that have been a lot more established. But for me, the fusion of all this stuff together creates new affordances of presence, new affordances of really being able to set a very distinct context to be able to put you as a protagonist of an experience, to test your limits of your own character so that you're going through these transformations. So I feel like what ends up with that is going to be very exciting to see how that unfolds. just to try to pull together all these different disciplines and domains and kind of fuse it all together.
[00:09:29.034] Ryan Schmaltz: Yeah, definitely. And, you know, and to your point about all the great people who are already working in this field, and that's where we can really create a dialogue here at the school by bringing some of those talented folks in and giving the students exposure to that where they haven't had it before. and really giving them the opportunity to think about game engines in a new way or think about how creating 3D characters or this notion of agency, which they may not have thought of before, how that can all play in and then provide them with these amazing tangible experiences from other folks working in the industry.
[00:10:04.126] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, uh, maybe you could go a little bit into more detail as to this whole residency program that you're having. Cause you know, a lot of how this conversation came about is because you're, you're actively trying to get the word out about this whole program that you're doing. Maybe you just kind of explain what it is that you're doing with this residency program.
[00:10:21.865] Ryan Schmaltz: Sure. Yeah, we have it too. So what we realized with the lab is there is this genuine interest and it's starting to come to a boil. And I know you feel it, Kent, and all of us in the industry are working in this space can tell as well that there is this desire to create content, but oftentimes one of the biggest hurdles to doing so, as you articulated, one of those is distribution and making sure that enough eyeballs see it. But prior to even getting to the distribution point, getting projects funded is so, so challenging. And so what we thought made sense, and one of the things that I'm particularly interested in, is a long time ago in my MBA program, I read a Harvard Business School case study around Pixar's creative process called Fostering Collective Creativity. And I was really taken with that because it was based on the premise that if you get talented people together from a variety of different backgrounds and skill sets, whether that be technical artists, storytellers, engineers, everybody has this creative nature amongst them, even for industries that are considered, quote unquote, not creative. And by bringing these folks together and setting them loose on a concept, or even better, creating the petri dish for them to develop their own concept and work together and overcome technical hurdles and work on story mechanics. That really resonated with me when I read that case study many years ago. And so what we've done at the school is apply that similar concept by creating a three-person, six-month residency for the Media Emerging Technology Lab, where three residents will come to here, to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and they'll basically work together to cultivate an idea and bring it to fruition. And during that residency process, they'll have the full breadth of the film school, our full back lot, sound stages, motion capture facility, pre- and post-production equipment, whatever they need to really be successful. And the residents that will come in, one will be a technical artist familiar making 3D characters, the second one will be a software engineer familiar with game engines, and the third one will be a screenwriter or a storyteller familiar with story mechanics and really crafting that narrative arc. And together, the three of them will come up with a concept of their choosing and bring that through to fruition.
[00:12:39.674] Kent Bye: Oh, wow. So it sounds like they're going to be there for six months in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Are they going to be working with the students as well, or are they just going to be off on their own six months to create something together?
[00:12:50.972] Ryan Schmaltz: Yeah, so they'll be predominantly working amongst the three of them. Then we've also got some industry advisors that will be helping out, including Jackie Barnbrook, who's worked on amazing immersive experiences like the Martian VR experience, as well as Bob Keane, who is here on faculty, who is the special effects faculty and also is really, really focusing a lot of his energy on immersive. In addition to that, what we'll have is students that will be working alongside them and learning from them and also contributing wherever they can. And we're still shaping what the student involvement looks like, but from the standpoint of the lab's relationships with the industry, with the film festival circuit, and also with faculty and staff, not only at UNCSA, where the film school resides, but also across the UNC system, which includes UNC Chapel Hill, NC State, And we also have Wake Forest University in our backyard. So the way the lab is positioned here in the community in North Carolina is we have all these different academic institutions to pull on for resources and expertise that can really help our residents be successful. Once they complete their project and once they bring their project to life, then what we'll do is we'll work with our existing relationships with Sundance Film Institute, Tribeca, and others. To help them get the, uh, exposure and build excitement for the projects that they've built. We'll also look towards alternative methods for increasing distribution, which we're still candidly figuring out.
[00:14:19.728] Kent Bye: That sounds great. And do they get an income or funding or what's the amount of resources they have access to if they get this residency program?
[00:14:28.479] Ryan Schmaltz: Yeah, each resident will receive a stipend and that stipend will really subsidize their time here in Winston-Salem and also a materials budget. We also have some discretionary funding set aside as well to account for any one-off or specific production costs that may arise depending on the nature of the project that the residents choose.
[00:14:47.755] Kent Bye: Well, one of the things that I find as a trend that I see is that there's a number of different immersive storytelling programs that are coming up, but they're not in these huge cities. And I find that as an interesting thing just because immersive storytelling, in some ways you need space. So places where you have access to space. you know, had an opportunity to come out to the UNC School of the Arts a year ago now for the Future of Reality Summit that I was helping to emcee throughout the course of that day. And I was just really impressed to see, like, this whole, like, mini Hollywood backlot just to have the space to be able to do that. And just how, you know, part of this decentralization out into areas that, you know, are not in these huge urban centers, but still could be a draw. I also think of something like Meow Wolf and in Santa Fe where they've created this whole destination of immersive experiences where people from around the world want to go there and experience it and they've you know expanding out to all these other locations but you know they're not starting in the biggest cities they're starting in these more regional cities and so I don't know, it's just something that I've found really interesting is going back to these local communities and trying to empower them with the tools and the immersive storytelling and to start to maybe tell stories that are connected to those local communities as well. But maybe you just talk a little bit about, you know, Winston-Salem and how you see that fit into the larger context of the larger immersive ecosystem.
[00:16:11.228] Ryan Schmaltz: Yeah, so Winston-Salem is a city of arts and innovation, and as somebody who has a transplant here from San Francisco, I know exactly what you mean. And for me, I think I was really taken with the community when I first got here because there is a lot of space. And really, that space and affordability of both real estate and cost of living, it sort of creates this environment for makers and artists and experimentation, unlike a lot of large metro areas where General economics make it hard to open up a boutique shop or set up a VR lab or a VR gaming place on a whim. It takes a lot of investment, a lot of capital to do so. And so when I got here, I was pleasantly surprised by just the amount of interest in this space. from seeing people use motion capture for doing physiology and research on athletes and how fatigue could increase the chances of injury, to building out immersive experiences for North Carolina-based corporations. We've also got Epic Games in our backyard, so I think there's a little bit of that energy and just general zeitgeist from Epic Games that permeates across the state. And then also what's happening across all the academic institutions, both in the research triangle with UNC Chapel Hill, NC State and also at Duke, there's a general history of experimentation and exploration that's happened here that I, you know, candidly in some ways stumbled onto and meeting with the legendary Fred Brooks and Henry Fuchs and all of their great research going all the way back to the 70s in virtual reality to applications that are happening every day here. We, you know, with Wake Forest Hospital right in our backyard as one of the top hospitals in the country, We're in active dialogue with them to figure out how MRSA can play in a more active role and how physicians are trained, improving patient care and the whole sort of ecosystem of healthcare. And so, yeah, long story short, there's a lot of really interesting things here that, you know, candidly caught me by surprise that I thought were only happening in urban centers. But I think also the environment that Winston-Salem is, the School of the Arts and the UNC system, it sort of creates this culture for exploration, taking chances and trying new things. And immersive is one of those areas where when you look at regional leaders for different industries, immersive doesn't yet have a regional go-to hub where if you want to work in this particular space, that's where you go, whether it's Silicon Valley or New York or London or Berlin or Hong Kong or Taipei for semiconductors. And so I think that there is this overwhelming desire to really look at where each of these communities can add value in this new dialogue of the immersive future.
[00:18:55.722] Kent Bye: Well, one of the things that I wonder is that we're kind of in this interim phase right now in terms of VR, where it hasn't reached a huge market penetration in the mainstream. I feel like there's some very positive indications with, I think both the Valve Index and Oculus Quest are currently sold out in a lot of places as we go into the holiday season. And so there's a huge demand for these headsets now, and I think the content is going to be there. And I think eventually it's going to get to the point where. We're gonna go beyond games into more of these immersive storytelling But we're also in this point where there isn't a lot of really solid business models for people to then Go to a school like UNC School of the Arts get a degree and then then what then what do you do? With all your skills if you want to be just this pure artist then how do you get the grants of the funding and with not having a viable distribution mechanism for a lot of these pieces then it ends up being a very self-contained festival circuit that It seems like the independent film dreams of going into Sundance and that's going to be your ticket into making your career. I don't necessarily see the same pathway for immersive creators at this point, where there is a lot of more pragmatic applications for enterprise training. You know, there's certainly compelling use cases, but that's a lot different than the pure artistic expression of being able to explore the potential of this new medium. And so I guess, how do you handle that as an art school? Do you start to then try to integrate more of the pragmatic applications for people learning how to do spatial computing so that once they graduate, then they may be able to onboard onto a pathway into working in this space until there's more of a vibrant ecosystem in that way? Or what's sort of the strategy for people getting into this space, what their career path might be?
[00:20:39.928] Ryan Schmaltz: Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, I think from a lab perspective, we look at things across the board. So I think the nondescript avant-garde art piece is equally interesting as training materials for a large corporation in virtual reality or VR training experience. And so when we look at content creation and storytelling, we're looking at it really across the board. And that's part of the thing that makes my job really, really interesting. And also from a student perspective and a faculty perspective, we're dancing across that line all the time because you'd be surprised how many different places those two worlds sort of influence each other. and where they come together and meet in the middle where you have these traditional like immersive film making pieces that you find at the film festival circuit today and so we're at the lab dancing between all the different areas from everything from enterprise to narrative to art pieces and from a student perspective they get that experience as well by doing commercial projects and so generally speaking what we try to do is look at everything we produce whether that be an art piece to an enterprise piece is look at it through the lens of things that drive social good in the community. Because we are a not-for-profit and because we're part of an academic institution, it affords us ability to be a little bit less bottom-line driven, really focused on how we can create value in the community. And so when we think about that, we think about it in the context of social equity. We think about it in the context of economic development here in North Carolina. We think about it in terms of literacy and outreach to rural communities and showing them both what's possible and also in terms of showing them where they can potentially take their own career paths as they prepare to graduate high school and look towards the future. And whether that future is at UNCSA or at other academic institutions in North Carolina or beyond, letting them know what the possibilities are alone creates this creative spark there. But there is a big component to what we look at to really assess the viability of immersive as a career path. And to your point, now it's very nascent, and it's hard to make money in this space. But I think the people who are working in this space, every person I have encountered thus far, their desire and the fact that they're in this space, first and foremost, is out of love for what they're doing and what they see the possibilities are.
[00:23:01.892] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah. And I know that there's certainly, you can take any experience that you are going into VR and you have to create a world. You have to learn how to create all the assets, but then there's this other dimension of story and storytelling. And if you're doing a training piece, then how do you do it into a whole interactive story that maybe is a larger narrative that is happening. And so. Is that something that you see a lot of in terms of the different collaborations that you're doing with enterprise is seeing how you can bring that background from the cinematic storytelling lessons for the last a hundred plus years and fusing that together into doing some of these more pragmatic enterprise projects.
[00:23:38.258] Ryan Schmaltz: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And there's some products I'm just itching to tell you about Ken, but we're not in a place where we can speak about them yet. But the power of empathy alone in the immersive experience is unbelievably valuable. And so from the perspective of, you know, you think about somebody who's working on at a call center job is to help incoming callers with their retirement planning or selling some of their 401k to paying an unexpected bill, or you think about it in the context in the medical world, helping a patient understand the extent of the procedure they're about to do, or how this particular equipment works with other equipment. It can sound a little bit boring on the surface, but once you dig your teeth in and see what an impact it's making in people's lives in terms of either saving them time or more pressing matters like of being or, or health, then those are the areas where I think the artists who work with our lab and sort of corporate led projects that we do really reach that connection point with the artists and where the artists can really get excited about what they're doing.
[00:24:40.929] Kent Bye: Hmm. Well, for you, what are some of the either biggest open questions you're trying to answer or biggest problems you're trying to solve?
[00:24:49.995] Ryan Schmaltz: Yeah, I think one of the things we're spending a lot of time on is how the narrative mechanics work, first and foremost. And just in terms of fundamental things like nausea and limitations of headsets to user experience and intuitiveness, those are some things that we're looking at. And then in conjunction with that, we're also really interested in the notion of agency and the right amount of agency for the right experience. And so when you offer a subject a level of agency, the further you go down the agency spectrum, the more the user is sort of fiddling around with the controllers, trying to figure out what button does what. And then on the other side of the spectrum, unless the subject matter is very compelling, their eyes can sort of glaze over and they just sort of along for the ride. And so having no agency and complete agency has its value in depending on the nature of the experience. But there is generally this spectrum and the sweet spot in the middle, depending on the specific experience that we're creating and trying to figure out what that is. that is both engaging for the user but also derives the maximum amount of value for the creator is another thing we're looking really closely at. The third thing that we're really fixated on is leveraging our motion capture facility and using that as a place where we can both produce content and really working really closely at that intersection point of real-time capture and then our real-time pipeline and pushing that into game engines straight away, and so really advancing the production process associated with creating immersive experiences. And the nice thing about that is that those processes apply both to traditional flat experiences that you'd see on a screen, as well as experiences that you would have in a headset. and being able to use those tools both to train filmmakers on having a level of flexibility in post-production that they never had before, but also in terms of streamlining the production process to make it much more easy and cost-effective to produce content and sort of all the mechanics that go along with that.
[00:26:56.363] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:27:07.068] Ryan Schmaltz: Kate, I love this question. Every time I listen to your podcast, I always enjoy listening to other people answer this question as well. For me, I think of the ultimate potential of VR and immersive in general as reaching the form factor where screens can go away. And so somebody said recently to me, we're going to get to a place where computing is like electricity in the walls. And so it's there, you plug into it, you can harness it when you need it. but it becomes almost a sort of a passive aspect of our lives. And I think that's ultimately where we're headed. And there's a few key steps that are going to get us there, but that we haven't quite reached yet. But I think that is the ultimate potential of Immersive is reaching a fluidity with computing.
[00:27:52.067] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah. The blending of the digital and the real, I think is going to be a spectrum that's going to be difficult to draw clear boundaries because I feel like if you look at the lens of human experience, then it's all just different ways of modulating human experience, whether it's digital or whether it's real. So I feel like it's, it's gonna be interesting times as we move forward. And yeah, just, is there anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:28:16.195] Ryan Schmaltz: Yeah, we're very interested in taking resident applications right now. The deadline is January 15th. If you go to METL, M-E-T-L dot org, you can learn more about our residency. It's really going to be exciting and it's our first time doing it. And we're taking applications from all over the world and we've seen some great applicants so far and we're looking forward to receiving some more.
[00:28:37.075] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Ryan, I just wanted to thank you for all the work that you're doing there at the UNC school of the arts and the metal lab. And, uh, yeah, I look forward to seeing what comes out of this. I'm excited to see bringing together all these different people and kind of incubating these different projects and prototypes. And, uh, yeah, I think it's important to continue to, uh, bring these people together and continue to experiment. So, yeah. Thanks for joining me today on the podcast.
[00:28:59.953] Ryan Schmaltz: Thank you, Ken, you know, and thank you for being the voice of the immersive community. I really appreciate your work.
[00:29:04.865] Kent Bye: So that was Ryan Schmaltz. He's the director of the Media and Emerging Technology Lab. And this was a sponsored post to be able to talk about the Immersive Storytelling Residency Program. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, I don't typically do a lot of sponsored posts, but really thought that this is an interesting program and actually a very interesting opportunity for people. If you are interested in going into North Carolina for six months, it looks like there's about a $3,500 a month stipend and that you're going to be collaborating with two other people if you get in. So they're looking for a technical artist to create different characters. someone who's a software engineer, someone who can get their way around either Unreal Engine or Unity to actually program some interactive content, and then a screenwriter or storyteller who wants to experiment and to push forward the medium in some ways, do these different types of interactive and immersive stories. So you can get more information on the METL website, that's the Median Emerging Technology Lab, and there'll be a link to the actual residency program in the show notes, which if you're listening to this before January 15th, you can still apply, but if not, then hopefully there's still some interesting aspects of this conversation. Like I said, I had a chance to go out to Winston-Salem and just get a sense of the city and the vibe, and as I travel around, there's this question that I have, it's like, what is the story of a place? And in this area of North Carolina, it has the UNC Chapel Hill that has a lot of the very early pioneers of virtual reality. A previous conversation with Dr. Fred Brooks, who actually wrote the book Mythical Man-Muth, but he also saw Alvin Sutherland speak in 1965 about the ultimate display. And then it was just really like inspired to come back to UNC and to start up like computer science programs, focusing on different aspects of computer graphics towards this vision that Ivan Sutherland had to be able to turn the computer into a window where you're actually stepping into this mathematical wonderland. So, and also Epic Games is right there in that area as well. And so if you're in these, one of these big cities, it can get very expensive. And so it just is drawing a lot of the creative culture there and what's at Salem to be able to experiment. And just the fact that they have a whole immersive storytelling program there means that they're having to keep up to date with what's happening and bringing different industry leaders. And also I just found that a lot of colleges, they're very interested in doing these different types of industry collaborations because a big part is that networking and to have people who have their own practices and can potentially help to teach those students as well. since a lot of the education these days is also moving towards these project-based learning, which is much more about actually creating different experiences and to try to put the theory into practice in a lot of ways. And especially with VR, where there isn't a lot of really robust critical theory or a hundred plus years of experiences to draw upon, then a lot of the program and click room there at UNC School of the Arts is with doing these different collaborations. It sounds like they've been also doing these different collaborations with different enterprise. For me, it's interesting just to hear that the industry is still unfolding. It's nascent. So a lot of the more pragmatic applications of working with medical training or other aspects of enterprise training and trying to find ways to embed the different aspects of storytelling into these immersive experiences. And Ryan said, you'd be surprised to see how much of these two worlds that can learn from each other, whether it's from. perspectives of agency or embodiment. And then from other side, you know, the power of storytelling and be able to set a larger context and to have character development and these things that if you're coming from a computer science background, you may not be well-versed in. And so having these interdisciplinary melting pots, I think is the big theme that I see that virtual reality is doing. And I continue to see that as a theme that you have these different collaborations that are starting to happen between enterprise and this art school in North Carolina. And that they're still trying to find out the mechanics of narrative. They're doing all sorts of different stuff with agency and interactivity and gaming. Ryan with his background of coming from working in technology, a lot of engineering aspects. And so really trying to look at how technology is changing and not only just for virtual reality and immersive storytelling, but also for virtual production. And a lot of these things with moving into real time game engines and to have like motion capture that goes directly into the game engine. So it sounds like they just have some great resources there to be able to start to experiment with a lot of that stuff. But a big theme that I see happening in Hollywood in general is this move towards real time and not doing highly rendered pre visualizations that take a long time to produce, but that. It's trying to become much more agile to create these different assets, to put it into the world much quicker, and to just have this whole pipeline that is not only having virtual reality be used to create assets, but to do virtual production and do cinematography, world building, just a lot of different aspects of that, that I hope to dive into more as I've been doing lots of different interviews with different folks from Hollywood and the game engines, just talking about the different trends of what's happening with how production is completely shifting over to this model of the real time. And, uh, yeah, just that, you know, eventually we're going to be having our existing screens go away and that there's going to be more of this fusion of us working with these digital objects with our bodies and much more natural intuitive interfaces. And that eventually the technology is just going to disappear and we're just going to be, have this fluid interactions in the seamless blending of the virtual and the real. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a list of supported podcasts, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.