Talk to enough experts about Hollywood’s next decade, and one thing becomes clear: The immersive virtual world known as the metaverse is coming. Not sure what that implies? You’re not alone. Rob Bredow, the SVP, chief creative officer of Industrial Light & Magic, whose history of visual-effects innovation includes everything from Terminator 2: Judgment Day to WandaVision, says even cutting-edge creators aren’t in sync when it comes to the metaverse. “It’s kind of an overloaded term,” he says. “Every time we have one of these discussions, the first question I ask is, ‘What do you mean by “metaverse”?'”
No matter how you define it, the metaverse will give big-budget Hollywood storytelling a major creative jolt. Granted, high-end high tech like virtual-reality headsets (which place you within a 360-degree interactive environment) and augmented-reality glasses (which overlay digital elements onto the real world) have yet to become must-have accessories. But in the next 10 years, VR and AR devices will become cheaper and easier, letting us enter the metaverse and interact with our favorite fictitious worlds and characters — a phenomenon that Bredow and his ILM team refer to as “story-living.”
