GS02 KEYNOTE: Why New Realities Require New Narratives
4:15 PM - 5:15 PM Wednesday, November 16
Grand Ballroom
Technology has a history of fundamentally shifting the ways people interact with information and with one another. We’ve seen it with the invention of radio and television, and more recently through the evolution of the Internet. We are approaching the dawn of yet another shift: the introduction of virtual, augmented, and other enhanced realities.
In this keynote session, you will take a journey into the coming world of virtual reality (VR) and explore how VR is shaping the future of content. Using his work with Oculus Story Studio as an example, Maxwell Planck will examine why new technologies require us to challenge our assumptions of what we do in order to fully explore the potential of what we could do. You will learn why new technologies require us to rethink our current narratives, and how virtual reality is changing the definition of “story” itself.
Maxwell Planck
Technical Founder
Oculus Story Studio
Maxwell Planck is the technical founder of Oculus Story Studio. After graduating from MIT, Maxwell joined Pixar as a computer graphics technical director, solving creative and technical problems on six animated feature films: Cars, WALL•E, Up, Brave, Monsters University, and The Good Dinosaur. After 10 years, Maxwell left to find his next adventure and help build something that is novel, entertaining, awe-inspiring, and unsolved. He found what he was looking for in virtual reality. Maxwell joined the Oculus team to build Oculus Story Studio, a small team of technical artists from film and games founded on the vision that VR is the next great medium for telling stories. Story Studio creates and releases stories in service of developing VR’s language, to show that this medium has the versatility to be an art form, and to inspire and educate the next generation of storytellers and audience members.
