WINSTON-SALEM – It’s commonly known as virtual reality, but to Susan Ruskin, what’s coming in the field of “immersive technology” is very real.

^ This Introduction to Virtual Reality from Felix + Paul Studios demonstrates some of the capabilities of virtual reality.

“The technology is moving more rapidly than it ever has,” says Ruskin, Dean of the School of Filmmaking at the UNC School of the Arts.  Just as updates to our mobile phones keep accelerating, she says, “Those iterations are happening faster and faster and faster.”

Ruskin sees UNCSA – and the state of North Carolina – as a hub for an explosive industry with multi-billion-dollar players like Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon.

She points to projections from Digi-Capital that consumption of immersive technology will increase from $3.9 billion in 2016 to $122 billion by 2020.  Traffic is projected to increase 61 times from 2015 to 2020, for an annual compound growth rate of 127%, according to the Cisco Virtual Network Index.

“We can’t really predict where virtual and augmented reality are going, but there’s a lot of investment in it across the board. And there will be explosive growth,” Ruskin says.  “It’s not just an entertainment tool.”

Indeed, potential applications extend well beyond film and gaming to medicine, education, retail, real estate – who knows?  Imagine…

• Real Estate/Architecture:  Let’s put on a headset and see how that home, office or store you want to build looks on that site – then let’s walk through it!
• Retail:  Let’s shoot a 360-degree video of your living room.  Now let’s put that couch in it and see how it looks.  Now make the couch blue – or red or brown or green … and walk around it.
• Medicine:  Let’s slice open that cadaver – oops, you didn’t make the incision quite right.  Let’s back up and do it again.  (Ruskin notes that some surgeons already use virtual simulations to practice for complex surgeries.)  Imagine the uses treating phobias and addictions.
  
• Military/Law Enforcement Training: Let’s put soldiers or officers in the middle of that jungle, desert or urban setting – without ever leaving the base or police station.
• Education:
  • Let’s put a history student on Omaha Beach on D-Day.  “You can experience it – you can feel it rather than hearing about it or reading about it,” Ruskin says.  “You have that feeling of being present … and therefore you remember it.”
  • Let’s learn to drive a forklift without climbing into one.  “They could train them in virtual reality rather than on an actual forklift, where they’re crashing and damaging an expensive piece of equipment,” Ruskin says.

Using state-of-the-art equipment supplied by manufacturers like Facebook’s Oculus VR, AMD, Radiant Images, Technicolor, and Epic Games, students and faculty at UNCSA are exploring the possibilities.

And the lifelike 360-degree images they deliver can trigger primordial, reptilian responses.

In one exercise, a visitor rides a virtual elevator up 20 floors, then the elevator doors “open” to reveal a plank extending out over a city plaza.

In his rational mind, the rider knows it’s a demonstration in an enclosed room.

But the images delivered through the headset along the optic nerve to the visual cortex prompt the viewer’s ‘lizard brain’ to take over:  The sensation of being 20 stories up with no restraints triggers a trembling response that makes one very reluctant to walk (or even inch) out on that plank.

^ NC House Speaker Tim Moore describes UNCSA virtual reality technology at the Higher Education Works Foundation’s “Aim Higher, Achieve More” forum in Charlotte on Oct. 4, 2017.

Nothing does the experience justice like putting on a headset, but the film school created a video of the production considerations involved:

Ruskin sees North Carolina uniquely positioned to be a player in this burgeoning industry.  She finds UNCSA – the smallest of UNC campuses – competing with larger institutions like the University of Southern California and Carnegie-Mellon University.

Much as North Carolina’s universities generated a technology hub in Research Triangle Park, “This is a natural extension of that,” she says.  With 17 public university campuses, “It’s a rich environment for clustering skill sets … to be a problem-solving center.”

She warns that in a field that’s seen rapid advances in the past six months alone, the state can’t wait two years to jump in.

Ruskin recently hired Ryan Schmaltz, who has advised a variety of startup tech companies, to develop strategic partnerships to make immersive technology a new economic driver for the UNC System and the state.

“Hardware without content won’t sell any units,” Schmaltz says.

“That’s where the UNCSA Film School can make a difference. North Carolina has world-class engineering and business schools and robust technology companies. UNCSA offers expertise in creative narrative content that completes the picture.”

Ruskin has already created a joint class with Wake Forest University’s entrepreneurship program.  She is discussing joint undertakings with a North Carolina engineering school. And she arranged for a series of industry leaders to speak at UNCSA.

The value to film students?  Ultimately, Ruskin says, virtual reality and artificial intelligence involve tracking and moving massive amounts of data to which human beings react.

“It’s really about understanding what matters to you,” she says.

As a result, she says, future filmmakers will need to be both storytellers and managers of that data.

And North Carolina is poised to capitalize – a less-expensive place to produce those mind-blowing images.

“The tsunami that’s coming our way is not going to affect only the coasts,” Ruskin says.