USC Ganek Immersive Studio to unveil student showcase
USC School of Cinematic Arts’ Ganek Immersive Studio, a creative hub dedicated to expanding the current boundaries of immersive storytelling and world building, has announced the line-up for its annual student Immersive Showcase.
The event will feature a slate of projects in various stages of development highlighting the groundbreaking work emerging from the Studio, said USC associate professor and studio director Jordan Halsey. The event will take place on the SCA campus on April 24.
The Ganek Immersive Studio, the first of its kind at the university level, commenced operations in the fall of 2022, thanks to a generous gift from David and Danielle Ganek and the Ganek Family Foundation. Equipped with cutting-edge facilities, the Studio serves as an interdisciplinary center for the development and production of immersive media content.
It operates akin to a contemporary creative design studio, with a modern, real-time production and visualization pipeline. The Studio is under the direction of Halsey, who spoke to us in an interview.
The Ganek Immersive Studio has spent the last year researching and modernizing its post-production and real-time pipeline to incorporate bleeding edge technology. For cinematic productions the Studio established a new pipeline for creating 16K stereo 180-degree content for the Apple Vision Pro and Immersive Cinema and shot five full productions incorporating that pipeline.
For real-time production, the Studio created Project Phosphorescence to showcase a new suite of tools combining artificial intelligence, machine learning, and procedural tool creation. With a focus on custom workflows in ComfyUI and complex 3D scene creation utilizing Pixar’s Universal Scene Description using Side FX Houdini and Houdini Engine for digital assets, this set of tools allows for the rapid prototyping of complex 3D world building tasks with outputs to easily move projects into Unreal Engine, Reality Kit, and Nvidia Omniverse.
“The work being created at SCA’s Ganek Immersive Studio exemplifies the bold, forward-thinking approach that defines our students,” said Halsey. “This year’s showcase highlights how our students are reimagining the art of storytelling through cutting-edge technology, turning imaginative concepts into compelling experiences. Our students are constantly breaking new ground and expanding their creative horizons to take us beyond the familiar and into entirely new worlds.”
“We are so excited about the work being fostered at SCA’s GIS under Jordan Halsey’s guidance. The projects featured in this showcase represent a concerted effort to push the boundaries of narrative-driven immersive content by combining traditional storytelling with innovative technology,” said David and Danielle Ganek, in a statement.
The Ganek Immersive Studio has been around for about three years, with much focus in the recent years on immersive real-time projects based on game engines. The group added a lot of Apple Vision Pro hardware vendors.
“We have an internal project that we’ve been working on called Project phosphorescence, which is basically a project that can allow us to further build out our real time pipeline and base it off of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description, which we believe is going to be the file format of the future,” Halsey said.
Halsey gets students to learn tools that enable them to undertake 3D productions. Each October, students submit projects and the faculty reviews them.
“We look at viability, and we look for projects that would enable us to investigate certain kinds of tasks that would help us accentuate our pipeline,” Halsey said. “We have a larger living space that helps us build out our cinematic and 3D pipeline for building immersive experiences.”
Halsey said there are AI tools emerging like Touch Designer, which was written by the same guy who wrote Houdini. Some of the lab projects involve multiple students across different parts of the university such as the School of Cinematic Arts.
Halsey said that he likes to have the students focus on projects with real commercial potential.
“With the cinematic projects, it was very important for us to create stories, and that’s what we really wanted to focus on. It’s like storytelling in the Apple Vision Pro with a cinematic medium.
“You can actually really now make incredible cinematic content that looks amazing in the headset. So that was really a game changer for me, and seeing that last year in the lab, right, that was the first time that I thought this was actually viable,” he said.
VR shot projects — 180 stereo cinematic production
The slate of projects selected embrace a wide range of technologies and storytelling mediums of VR, XR, AR and A.I. as artistic platforms; they can include the following:
• A Larger Living Space – Director, Nathan Fairchild
When a man living in a tiny shoebox apartment meets a girl he wants to impress, he buys an experimental new product called “Space Solutionz” in an attempt to upgrade his tiny living quarters. As the space around him begins to shift, expand, and reconfigure, he finds that the results of his experiment are much more than he bargained for.
• Performance Improvement Plan – Director, Jinrun Han
A long-time data entry clerk is subjected to a surreal and sinister corporate program where compliance isn’t just expected—it’s enforced through bizarre psychological experiments, brutal punishments, and a fight for survival.
• Elevator – Director, Lilleth Glimcher
When two clubbers follow a mysterious invitation to an underground party, their evening descends into a nightmare.
• Code Red – Director, Fiyin Gambo
When her husband is wrongfully arrested, a pregnant hairstylist and her misfit salon crew plot a daring courthouse breakout—armed with nothing but beauty tools and sheer determination.
Trailer
• Crime Scene – Director, Christian CuevasPolice Procedural
Virtual production
• In The Wake of the Whale – Director, Claire Li360 Stereo Virtual Reality – Unreal Engine – This is the first VR “Virtual Thesis” project. A young whale calf and their mother navigate the vast, enchanting depths of the ocean, but their tranquil life is disrupted by human activity—seismic surveys, noisy ships, and environmental damage.
• Phosphorescence – Director, Akaash Tumuluri
This is an in-house studio project and technical demonstration to prove the efficacy of our 3D content and real-time pipeline. This will show how we can push our content to any application and we will have several demos based on this. A lone scientist sent on a solo research mission to Jupiter’s moon Ganymede encounters an alien substance that forces him to reckon with his own humanity.o All 3D Production with Motion Capture
AI projects and technical demos
• Peace Lily – Creator, Somi AwasthiA real-time generative story created using AI and Touchdesigner
• Space Movie – Creator, Dylan WakeAI Space Short
• Ganek Studio AI Testing and Experiments
As for the state of games, Halsey said it has “just been a incredible series of troughs.” Some devices like the Apple Vision Pro are starting to unlock more content too.
Ultimately, Halsey said he would like to have teams that think about intermediary technologies on the path to the Star Trek Holodeck.
