Welcome to another VR Job Hub where every weekend gmw3 gathers together vacancies from across the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and now Web3 industries, in locations around the globe to help make finding that ideal job easier. Below is a selection of roles that are currently accepting applications across a number of disciplines, all within departments and companies that focus on immersive entertainment.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there are always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology-related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (community@gmw3.com).
We’ll see you next week on gmw3 at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
Los Angeles-based creative studio Magnopus has a prestigious back catalogue, working on a multitude of XR experiences. When it comes to virtual reality (VR) content the company has created the likes of Disney Pixar Coco VR (2017) and more recently Elixir (2020), the magical experience designed to showcase Oculus Quest’s hand tracking. These have all been single-player experiences but a new job listing indicates the studios’ intention to get into multiplayer gaming.
Currently, Magnopus is looking for a “Senior Backend Server Multiplayer Engineer” to join its team in LA, someone who can “Design, develop, and maintain a highly distributed, scalable, low-latency multiplayer environment.” As is always the case when trying to glean new project details from job listings there’s very little to go on. However, it does note that it’ll bode well for applicants: “Past experience working with VR/AR content and understanding what makes these mysterious worlds so enticing.”
Co-founded in 2014, by Ben Grossmann, an Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor, to date Magnopus has created over 80 immersive projects, some of which have made it to home VR headsets. The company recently made the news thanks to its acquisition of British XR specialist REWIND, which it has previously worked with on several projects.
REWIND built projects like Danny MacAskill’s VR Ride Out and Universal Monsters Presents: Bride of Frankenstein holoride. When talking about the announcement Grossmann did mention: “The team is brimming with talent so this acquisition has just given us a turbo boost on our journey toward big things we’ve been cooking up.” There’s always the possibility that with such a rich talent pool to draw from Magnopus is creating its own in-house experience which would be exciting.
As VRFocus learns more about Magnopus’ future VR plans we’ll let you know.
Every weekend VRFocus gathers together vacancies from across the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) industry, in locations around the globe to help make finding that ideal job easier. Below is a selection of roles that are currently accepting applications across a number of disciplines, all within departments and companies that focus on immersive entertainment.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on VRFocus at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
In the latest acquisition news British virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) specialist REWIND has announced its now joined Magnopus, another prominent immersive design company that has worked on projects including Disney’s remake of The Lion King.
Universal Monsters Presents: Bride of Frankenstein holoride, developed by REWIND
REWIND has worked on a number of well-known experiences for global brands such as Red Bull, BBC, HBO, Jaguar, Paramount, and Universal Pictures. Danny MacAskill’s VR Ride Out appeared in Amsterdam last year, where shoppers heading to the city’s Ride Out bike store could test a one-of-a-kind bike rig and ride the dizzying Collies Ledge in the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Its Universal Pictures collaboration was for Universal Monsters Presents: Bride of Frankenstein holoride, an in-car entertainment experience in collaboration with Ford.
As for Magnopus, its credentials include Mission:ISS, an interactive experience about life on the International Space Station (ISS). The company also worked on Disney Pixar’s Coco VR as well as many more immersive projects.
“We’re thrilled to join the Magnopus group and it represents a landmark step in our company’s transformation. We were already at an inflection point as we sharpened our offering to focus on hybrid, real-time experiences, now we are ushering in a new chapter. This acquisition will not only fuel our growth but build a transatlantic powerhouse,” said Sol Rogers, CEO and Founder of REWIND in a statement. “We have worked together on many projects over the years, so it feels good to be able to officially call the entire team at Magnopus our colleagues.”
Emmy-Nominated VR experience Mission:ISS, a real-time engine recreation of the International Space Station, which Magnopus developed in collaboration with NASA, European Space Agency, and Oculus.
“We’ve always admired REWIND and enjoyed working with them. The team is brimming with talent so this acquisition has just given us a turbo boost on our journey toward big things we’ve been cooking up. Together we’re stronger and I’m incredibly excited about what we’re building now. Our ambition is to continue to bring great experiences into the world while empowering others to do the same,” Ben Grossmann, Co-Founder of Magnopus adds.
Magnopus and REWIND have yet to reveal any new projects just yet. When they do VRFocus will let you know.
It’s time for the last VR Job Hub of 2020 and what a year it has been. Whether you’re already in the videogame industry and looking for a new challenge or are keen to enter the XR field, VRFocus has plenty of new vacancies to peruse over as you plan for 2021.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on VRFocus at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
Every weekend VRFocus gathers together a number vacancies from across the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) industry, in locations around the globe, to help make finding the ideal job easier. Below are a selection of roles that are currently accepting applications across a number of disciplines, all within departments and companies that focus on VR, AR and MR.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on VRFocus at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
Elixir is a free hand-tracking demo game for Oculus Quest developed by Magnopus and Facebook Reality Labs. You can download it and play it right now!
We went over some early impressions of the hand tracking and Elixir itself back at Oculus Connect 6 last year, but now that Elixir is out for the public as well you can download it for free. I just played through the entire short demo experience in about 10 minutes — it’s basically a very simply puzzle game.
You’ll need a reasonably sized playspace to move around, roughly 6.5 by 6.5 feet, and your hands. That’s it. No controller required!
Things start out simply enough with you learning how to teleport using hand tracking by making a triangle with your fingers, Tien style, and then pinching both your index fingers to your thumbs. It’s neat, but isn’t ever used again after you learn how to do it. The actual experience is fully roomscale.
There’s a sorceress that wants to hire you as her new apprentice, but naturally, all you can manage to do is muck stuff up. Every time she tells you not to do something, you’re expected to do just that thing until everything in her dungeon is exploding and messing up. It’s very cute, pretty funny, and full of lots of clever interactions that morph your hands into various things.
For a free app that shows a bit of what you can do with hand tracking, it’s certainly worth the download. And if you really like this brand of whimsical fun, consider giving Waltz of the Wizard a try, which just got full hand tracking support today too.
Oculus Quest’s hand tracking has been available as a beta feature since December, providing limited functionality across system menus and first-party apps. Today, Oculus has announced that the technology is moving into general release with third-party apps adding hand tracking later this month.
Hand Tracking has been an optional extra which Oculus Quest owners could switch on via the Experimental Features section. It never meant you could put away your Oculus Touch controllers, simply helping you see where the tech was heading.
With the anniversary of Oculus Quest’s launch this week, that experimentation begins to change. On 28th May, Oculus will begin accepting third-party titles that include hand tracking to the Oculus Store, starting with Elixir from Magnopus; The Curious Tale of the Stolen Petsby Fast Travel Games and Aldin Dynamics’ Waltz of the Wizard: Extended Edition.
Elixir puts youin an unstable alchemy lab where you can cast spells, mix potions, and poke a nauseated dragon. Actions allow you to obtain new and powerful hands, altering their anatomy in the process. Puzzle title The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets has been available for a while, with the developer previously teasing hand tracking capabilities. The same can also be said for Waltz of the Wizard: Extended Edition which recently rolled out new locomotion updates.
“Hand tracking really does enhance immersion and is the perfect fit for The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets“, says James Hunt, Creative Lead on the game in a statement. “It adds a whole new level of connection between the player and the miniature worlds with all their interactive elements. Things like picking up snowballs, waving a magic wand or just petting the pets once you’ve found them feels more real – and fun! – than ever before.”
In addition to those three videogames, Oculus will also be launching the Cinematic Narratives Set featuring Gloomy Eyesand The Line. Two award-winning immersive experiences, their official Oculus Quest launch with native hand tracking will be on the 28th.
SideQuest has allowed developers to release hand tracking features (Tea for God, Interdimensional Matter)for Oculus Quest users since the SDK went live but this will be the first time via Oculus Store. Where appropriate – not all games will suit the tech – the store should see an influx of hand tracking over the summer, allowing gamers to put their controllers down for the first time.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Oculus Quest and its hand tracking, reporting back with further updates.
There are all kinds of awards out there – mainly because most everything has some organisation quantifying who are the best in what they do. Now we’re in the fourth quarter of the year it’s only natural that we end up seeing more awards ceremonies to reveal the high achievers of 2018.
Earlier this week VRFocus hit the red carpet for the VR Awards 2018, which once again celebrated the field of virtual reality (VR).
“The VR Awards is at the centre of recognition and celebration of outstanding achievement in VR.” Says the organisation, “Combined with year-round international initiatives, the VR Awards brings together a night of red carpet highlights, the celebration of excellence and unique access to the world’s most influential names in immersive technology.”
A media partner for the event, Nina Salomons and Kevin Joyce were both in attendance and even helped dish out the awards during the evening. You can find a list of the winners below, as well as some footage of the event and interviews with several of the victors.
“Pixar originally didn’t want to do the project [Coco VR] because they didn’t think we could hit the quality bar that they found acceptable,” said Ben Grossmann, Co-Founder of Magnopus. “We had to prove ourselves.”
And they did just that. Magnopus is an entertainment experience company founded by people that have decades of experience, awards, and creativity. The Google meta description for their website explains that they aim to “tell stories without borders” and the “What” page of the site states that they’re “creating the impossible by any means necessary.”
What better way to do that than with the immersive power of virtual reality?
Greatest Work
“All new employees at Magnopus are told that, regardless of the problem or how new they are, that they have the power to raise their hand and say that something isn’t good enough,” said Grossmann.
From what I’ve heard in talking to people from Disney and Pixar, that’s very much along the lines of the same ideas those companies preach. Walt Disney himself once famously said, “Whatever you do, do it well,” and that feels like it’s ingrained into the DNA of not only Pixar and Disney as companies, but Magnopus as well. They may not be the household name that Pixar is, but it doesn’t mean that their work isn’t of award-worthy quality already.
In fact, Magnopus has already earned three different Emmy award nominations for its projects in the VR arena (Mission: ISS, Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab, and Coco VR) and it’s only a matter of time before one of them takes home the prize.
“Our secret sauce is all the projects that you haven’t seen,” said Alex Henning, another Co-Founder of Magnopus in an interview. “Being willing to iterate a lot and to try a lot of things early, to fail fast as it were and build up our knowledge as quickly as possible by tackling real world challenges.”
During our chat Grossmann told me that “Magnopus” is a portmanteau of the Latin words for “greatest work” (Magnum Opus) and they’ve built their entire company around that mantra. And they’re focusing so heavily on VR because they see it as the future of entertainment — at least until something better comes along.
“We want to take people beyond the movie theater,” said Grossmann. “We founded Magnopus right around when Oculus was getting out of Kickstarter and started out very quietly. We’ve stayed quiet. All the time people spend talking at conferences is time not spent actually pushing things forward. You could just go build it.”
Each of Magnopus’ three major VR projects to date (listed above) have been about not just replicating things you can see elsewhere, but rather putting you inside of an experience that transports you. Instead of re-enacting or watching a scene from the recent Blade Runner film, the Memory Lab experience gives you total freedom. Instead of walking through the land of the dead as Coco, you actually become one of the skeletons with full customization in a multiplayer sandbox environment. And Mission: ISS is still one of the best, most visually impressive, and engaging space simulations out there. The fact that NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency were all involved in that collaboration is immediately apparent.
“The mindset for us has always been to look for areas that we feel like we can concentrate and create some sort of lasting impact,” said Henning. “As interesting as it is to create this type of content, that’s just scratching the surface of what all of the applications of this technology [VR and AR] might be.”
There’s still a long way to go though. What Magnopus straddles the line between game and movie in a way that few things have and it really feels like the idea of a “VR experience” is starting to become more defined. Compare Coco VR to something like the Beauty and the Beat VR dress rehearsal and it’s like night and day. This stuff is truly on another level.
“You have to build up a culture where quality is a critical bar,” said Grossmann. “This medium is still so young and still evolving and there is a lot of stuff out there that just doesn’t work well. Now is the time to figure all that stuff out before the spotlight turns on with tens of millions of consumers.”
Obviously for a collaboration with Pixar, using their own original IP, it’s going to be sticky. That’s a company that cherishes their attention to quality and detail. The fact that they originally turned down Grossmann, Henning, and the rest of Magnopus — despite their previously existing awards and work — speaks volumes.
“For Coco VR, we asked ourselves, since it is an interactive experience that puts the user at the center, how little story can we have and still have it be fun? How much narrative is too much narrative? What’s the balance between linear and non-linear? If you take two friends and put them somewhere with fun stuff to do, we found most people will create their own experiences.”
As a consumer and someone that spends a lot of time in VR, it’s easy to notice things that don’t work well. As much as I love Skyrim VR, even after dozens of hours, I still find myself unsure about which buttons bring up which menus while playing. But if I put someone in Job Simulator, even if they’ve never tried VR or even a video game in their life, it’s immediately intuitive.
“For good VR, the technology should be invisible and it should just feel like magic,” said Grossmann. What better way to create magic than to get Disney and Pixar involved?
The Pixar Touch
“A couple years ago as VR was hot in the industry there was conversation internally about ‘Should we do VR’ at Pixar,” said Marc Sondheimer, Producer on Coco VR. “Something like a short story we could tell. At the same time we started thinking that an existing property would make it more cost effective. We even had the Disney Technology and Innovation Group approach us to explore VR with one of our film projects.”
And then, enter Magnopus. Their collaboration pitch was initially turned down, but they were able to win over Pixar with their ideas and attention to detail. This isn’t Disney’s first foray into VR by any means, especially if you consider The Void’s Star Wars experience, all of the 360 video work they’ve done, and the one-off apps we’ve seen pop up on stores. ILMxLAB’s Trials on Tatooine is still a fan favorite as well.
But the Coco VR project was very different.
“Usually we start with a traditional movie script and iterate on that before production, but VR is a different beast than cinema,” said John Halstead, Supervising Technical Director at Pixar. “We did go through a few versions of something you’d maybe call a script but it read more like a list of potential outcomes than an actual script.”
It’s a fascinating process to think about. Since a VR experience is a space that you can exist in, rather than a rectangle you stare at, there are so many more variables. The viewer’s whims and interests are for more likely to derail what you have planned since you can’t force someone to look at something in VR.
“We do a lot of story boarding, so our version of story boarding for this was basically creating a rough build of the experience and going through and talking about goals and what works,” said Halstead. “Like a 3D story board.”
One can only hope that Pixar’s interest in VR continues. The main thing that VR needs right now is great, immersive content from the masters of their craft. On the gaming front studios like Sony, Bethesda, Ubisoft, and more are all pushing VR heavily in their projects, so if more Hollywood-caliber companies like Pixar continue to step up, we could see a lot more projects like Coco VR getting awards and nominations from companies like Magnopus and others.
“We are still exploring the medium, but there are no concrete plans to shift attention from film to VR or anything like that,” said Sondheimer. “We are still interested in it and exploring it, but it’s also playin an important role in film production too. We are putting sets inside game engines so directors can explore the spaces in a headset as they make the film. That’s already being used in both Toy Story 4 and another 2019 film.”
Okay so, Toy Story 4 VR…please? Now that Kingdom Hears 3 is getting a VR experience, anything is possible, right?
“The VR Awards is at the centre of recognition and celebration of outstanding achievement in VR.” Says the organisation, “Combined with year-round international initiatives, the VR Awards brings together a night of red carpet highlights, the celebration of excellence and unique access to the world’s most influential names in immersive technology.”
