The Sanctity of Experience: Attention
by Jessica Brillhart
Biography
Jessica Brillhart is the Director of the Mixed Reality (MxR) Lab at the University of Southern California for Creative Technologies and the founder of the immersive content studio, Vrai Pictures. Prior to her appointment, she was the Principle Filmmaker for Virtual Reality at Google spearheaded numerous efforts in the fields of virtual reality, augmented reality, and intelligent systems.
Brillhart is the author of the Medium series, In the Blink of the Mind, which dives into the language of VR and the state of immersive content. She has presented keynotes at such conferences as SXSW, Google IO, Oculus Connect, FMX and the Aspen Ideas Festival and has collaborated with everyone from Yo-Yo Ma to the Canadiens de Montréal.
She was recognized by MIT Technology Review 35 Under 35 in 2017 and is a past recipient of the The Advanced Imaging Society’s Distinguished Leadership Award in cinematic innovation. Brillhart’s work continues to explore the experiential potential of emergent technologies, the stories these technologies and mediums can tell, and the language that helps us tell them.
Project description
With the simple use of a stool (or chair), we will explore a core foundation of immersive experiences – attention – from wherever you are. Where does our attention go when we exist in a space? What meets us when we shift our perspective to its opposite? How is our attention challenged in a place that’s unfamiliar versus familiar? Is it sharper in a space that’s naturally occurring versus fabricated? How do these answers compare to others? And, most importantly, how to we leverage this now understood loss of control to better craft in the immersive medium?