VR and AR

After five years in Google’s Creative Lab, Brillhart became its principal filmmaker for VR and helped develop the Jump live-action capture system. As VR became more established, she found it harder to steer work toward ideas she considered important. She left to start Vrai Pictures, where she could explore how VR, AR, and machine learning might work together.

Brillhart distinguishes storytelling, which guides someone toward an outcome, from story, which she sees as the core meaning. In VR, she aims to build worlds where people can explore and still discover that meaning in different ways. She recommends reducing a broad idea to its central truth, then shaping the experience’s flow, audience, hardware constraints, and the abilities people have within it.

Brillhart points to Myst and Red Dead Redemption as games that let players explore while also offering paths back into a larger story. She also discusses Florence, which uses familiar phone interactions to express relationship moments, and Blackbox, which makes players reconsider how they use their phones. For her, the medium’s conventions and constraints can become part of how a story works.

After leaving Google, Brillhart explored projects across VR, AR, and other forms of immersive work. She describes four projects in development, including a music biopic, an architectural exploration, a simple experimental game, and an immersive audio project. She sees possible uses beyond entertainment, including education and hospitals, and argues that audio deserves attention because it helps establish a sense of place.

Brillhart sees VR as a way to focus, relax, and revisit places, but worries that recording everything could undermine the value of forgetting. She recalls that moving around in a reconstruction of her World Tour footage made the memory feel more immediate than watching it. In social VR, she sees people learning together, while warning that harassment and realistic interactions require care from creators.