BACKGROUND

Blueplanet VR was founded by Eric Hanson, who has an extensive background in visual effects, working on major award winning feature films like e.g. The Fifth Element, Cast Away, Fantasia 2000 and The Day After Tomorrow at leading VFX houses like Digital Domain, Sony Imageworks, Dream Quest Images and Walt Disney Feature Animation.

Eric’s innovative techniques toward comprehensive 360 environmental capture for immersive media projects in fulldome, IMAX and VR led to his present focus on full volumetric reconstruction for roomscale 6DOF VR.

As a longstanding professional educator, Eric is also a Professor of Practice at USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles, developing curriculum and leading courses centered on immersive media, 3D animation, stereoscopic filmmaking, and virtual reality.

His immersive work and photography has been featured at many prestigious events, film festivals, and exhibitions around the world, such as Vancouver International Film Festival, Jackson Wild Film Festival, Mountainfilm Festival, MY HERO International Film Festival, SIGGRAPH, AWE, and VRLA.

Collaborators, partners and clients include Bjork’s retrospective at MoMA NYC, American Film Showcase, Octave 9 at the Seattle Symphony, Ai WeiWei’s land art collaboration with Navajo artist Bert Benally, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and the California Academy Of Sciences, New York Times, and collaborations with international and governmental organizations focused on cultural heritage, cultural diplomacy, nature and environmental conservation and protection such as PBS Frontline, Dunhuang Foundation, the Onward Project, USC, and the US Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

BLUEPLANET VR

After co-founding and running the immersive media studio xRez Studio for 14 years, Eric founded Blueplanet VR in 2019 to produce original nature and cultural heritage content for virtual reality and immersive cinema.

With its first version released in 2020, Blueplanet VR Explore is the company’s flagship product, featuring an expanding range of unique, high-quality VR experiences which have been created using photogrammetry, allowing the viewer full freedom of movement, from sacred Buddhist temples to Icelandic waterfalls, from hidden Native American sites across the vast US Southwest to deep caves, melting Arctic glaciers, volcano craters, and much more.