Hollywood explores the lucrative 3D virtual reality market

demos shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, they point to where Hollywood is headed with virtual reality.

Fox is betting consumers will buy immersive video products just as they purchase DVDs or songs.

“We’re pretty excited about what this means for the future,” Mike Dunn, Fox’s pres- ident of worldwide home entertainment, said. “This technology will not just be good in the movie business and gaming, but expand into other parts of lifestyle.”

The so- called augmented and virtual reality market will grow to $1.06 billion by 2018, according to a report by MarketsandMarkets, while others peg that figure much higher.

Virtual reality offers studios a way to sell motion pictures as experiences, like the holographic playground in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Fox’s clip tied to Wild gives users a panoramic view of the forest, along with visits from actresses Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. The studio will take the presentation to the Sundance Film Festival this month as it starts to entice filmmakers to use the technology.

“We hope we’ll be able to use that as a platform,” Dunn said. “We have established film-makers and up-and-coming ones. We can show the starting vision of what this will be. They are the most important constituents we have right now.”

Some of the biggest names in technology are staking out positions.

Samsung Electronics began selling its Gear VR headset in December, offering games and clips, and Google has Cardboard, a lower-cost model. Facebook’s Oculus division, which supplies the technology to Samsung, is working on a headset of its own.

“People now see that massmarket adoption could be much greater than previously anticipated,” said Jens Christensen, chief executive officer of virtual reality start-up Jaunt. To sell headsets, the companies that create them will need more than good software.

“If you’re going to buy a headset, you want things to watch on it,” Christensen said. – Washington Post