Industrial Light and Magic, the visual effects company behind many of the greatest sci-fi movies of the last 40 years, has pioneered some of the coolest technologies in filmmaking, from 3D modeling to CGI.
The studio has done it again — this time in the secret quarters of the ILMxLab, a research and development playground on the Lucasfilm campus where artists, engineers, sound designers, and storytellers prototype the future of entertainment.
The makers of "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"— the franchise's first film outside the established trilogies — used virtual reality and augmented reality technologies created in the ILMxLab to explore the movie's sets before they were physically built.
At the Bloomberg Businessweek Design 2016 conference in San Francisco, Tech Insider had the chance to sit down with Vicki Dobbs Beck, executive in charge of the ILMxLab.
She tells us a group within ILMxLab called the Advanced Development Group (ADG) played a crucial role in bringing "Rogue One" to life. The team can import assets made for the movie, like characters and structures, and use game-engine technology to build a set, render it on an ILM server in real-time, and stream it to a tablet or headset.
"We literally use VR to allow a director to understand his set before it's ever built in any physical form," Dobbs Beck says, "and there's some real benefits, as you can imagine."
Cost is one of them. If a director steps into a set conceived for their movie and sees that a door doesn't match their specifications and should be moved a little to the left, they can request a change before it comes to fruition. This could save the studio tons of money in set design.
From the director's perspective, virtual reality helps them craft a universe and plan shots accordingly.
"One of the things that VR is great at is scale," Dobbs Beck says. "Visualization is extremely important."
Dobbs Beck confirmed that director Gareth Edwards used the technology to preview sets during the production of "Rogue One," but declined to get more specific. The Verge's Bryan Bishop reports Edwards used an Oculus Rift setup.
While the movie's premiere is months and months away, you can get a peek at the sets in the first teaser trailer.
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