Inspiring Wonder and Dreaming with Baobab Studios’ Animated VR Shorts
Maureen Fan is the former vice president of gaming at Zynga, but she’s always had a passion for animation. Maureen’s mind was blown open the first time she experienced VR because she saw that the future of animation was going to be within Virtual Reality. She left Zynga about six months ago, and within a couple of weeks met her Baobab Studios co-founder Eric Darnell who directed Antz as well as wrote and directed four Madagascar films. They quickly assembled a team of other animated film veterans and put together a 2-minute trailer that helped them to secure $6 million dollars led by Comcast Ventures with participation from HTC and Samsung Ventures as well as others.



Pete Moss is Unity’s “VR Dude” in that he’s been a long-time believer and advocate in the cross section between VR and gaming and how the Unity game engine could play a significant part. He talks to me about his dual role of content creator and dogfooding the Unity engine as well as evangelizing VR to different communities and collecting experience prototypes from different game jams and developers from around the world. Pete’s passion for the potential of virtual reality is clear, and he’s the most excited to see how artists use VR to express themselves given that VR provides completely new pathways into the brain.












