“Content is everything.”
Ivan Sutherland‘s words rang true last night during the annual Proto Awards for VR. Virtual reality hardware is finally getting to the point where it is ready for consumers, but the content to go with it still needs to be made. That’s one of the problems that Samsung is looking to solve with their new contest “There in 60 seconds.”
The contest, which is targeting emerging VR filmmakers, issues a simple, and yet complex challenge: create an immersive, 360-degree video that is just 60 seconds in length that “takes us to a place in the world that is special and unique to them.” The contest, which will open its portal for submissions on November 1st, carries with it a $10,000 cash prize.
The contest will be judged by Jason Rubin, the head of Worldwide Studios for Oculus, Nancy Bennett, the chief content officer at Two Bit Circus, and Anthony Batt, the cofounder and executive vice president of WEVR, all of whom will also act as mentors to the participants as well. They will work together to select the top five experiences from the submissions on December 15th.
Using the Gear Indie channel on Samsung’s Milk VR app, Samsung is looking to highlight high-quality content coming from the indie VR filmmaker community and this contest is the first step in enabling those creators to do something special.
