The future, right before your eyes
Can you see the future?
Perhaps not, if you’re looking through the 5-inch screen of a phone. But it’s out there, and it’s coming.
A future without bezels, or blinders. Without horizons, continents, or seas between us. One that feels like real life, but infinite in its canvas… A future where our content is both immersive and interactive, bridging mediums of the past to create something totally new.
Is it a game? A film? Is it blended, like your favorite smoothie? To us, it’s not about what you call it. It’s about how it feels. Because this isn’t an experience you merely hold in your hands, but one you inhabit. One that will be the new standard for almost everything… soon enough.
But, is this something to be feared? Do we really want technology even closer to our eyes, our brains, our bodies? We believe that a new era in powerful, emotional, human creativity is just ahead of us… but only if everyone can have a hand in building it. Until then, our future will be constructed only by those who can code it — in Silicon Valley, or Hollywood, or beyond.
You deserve to be the co-creator of our new reality. But you’ll need the right tools to do it.
Our mission is to expand the landscape of creativity, so everyone can create immersive experiences that touch the world.
This is why we made Playbook: the first XR environment for prototyping immersive content together. More than an app, a game, or a film, the content you create will take advantage of everything VR offers — but be editable by anyone, from any screen. Whether you’re a designer, director, or just a dabbler, we aim to empower a whole new generation of people to show us what’s in their heads — not just those who know the code and lingo.
As the graphical user interface once made computing accessible to all, our hope is that Playbook can do the same for XR creation and development. As such, Playbook is not the next game engine — for now, at least! It’s an interface for developing immersive ideas, which sits in between preproduction and postproduction. Between design and development. Usable by the ideators, but transferable to the builders when it’s time to make those ideas a reality.
We were born in the real world. Our team is made of architects, set designers, animators, and game makers — in service of a new vision for entertainment. Or maybe, an old one. In our view, we aren’t reinventing the wheel of what makes an amazing scene or experience work. We live in 3D spaces, after all, and have been creating spatial entertainment for thousands of years. From stagecraft to urban planning, we’ve been defining the tenets of great spaces and the stories within them for quite some time. Now, we’re just bringing it to the future, and putting it in more hands.
For example… In the world of film, we’ve spent decades boarding out scenes for our characters to inhabit — doing our very best to imagine a viewer’s response, without really ever knowing until the film is edited and done. Shouldn’t we be able to experience a story as we create it? The sweet spot is not always easy to find when you’re looking over someone’s shoulder, and when there isn’t space to iterate. But when you’re there, in the moment, you can simply point it out. And now, your team can see exactly where you’re pointing.
However, this goes far beyond a better way to prototype predetermined stories. We believe the future of entertainment will be far more interactive — empowering new kinds of content that are responsive to you, as “games” thus far have been. In these experiences, mise en scene become more than wall dressing for eagle eyed film buffs, but a core part of the experience itself to be touched and manipulated.
Being able to change everything offers intense opportunity, but also pressure. You’ll need all your instincts to feel out what feels right, which is why being there with your collaborators and using all your senses is so important. The best creative ideas arguably come from one mind, but they only become real when executed by a team tightly rallied around one vision.
You can see the future, if you only look hard enough.
A future you can have a hand in building, with the 27 degrees of freedom hands offer. We believe this freedom and ability to collaborate will afford entirely new kinds of experiences. So, what kind of world will you create? Will you create new kinds of physics, or break them? — creating a world only you now can?
We’ll see you inside.
The Playbook Team
