"Kevin Mack, meanwhile, wants to use VR's potential to create dissociative sensations for the purpose of art. Virtual Reality, he thinks, "is better suited as a medium for art than it is as a medium for narrative storytelling and for games." And movies are something Mack knows a thing or two about—when I asked him what he did before his stint in VR, he casually said, "I helped kind of pioneer computer graphics for visual effects." Mack won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1999 for his work on Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come, starring Robin Williams, and his father was an animator for Disney. He recently quit a big Hollywood job (he wouldn't say which project specifically) to concentrate on VR.
His program, called Shape Space, is nearly the polar opposite of the frenetic World War Toons. Shape Space is an exercise in what he calls "forced mindfulness," and takes the user on a 90-second long journey in which abstract, three-dimensional sculptures pass through the viewer as if they were clouds. It's a wholly zen sensation, offering the user the opportunity to drift through a surreal space, disembodied. When I asked Mack at what point he wanted to make VR the focus of his work, he told me, "1973. I used to dream of this stuff. It's finally coming true. It was so much fun when computer graphics was new to visual effects and we were pioneering it and inventing the whole process and that's kind of settled. So this is the new thing, and I want to help pioneer this."