Philip Lelyveld runs the Immersive Media (VR/AR/MR) Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC@USC), a think tank within the School of Cinematic Arts. The ETC@USC is funded by the major Hollywood studios, Cisco, Microsoft, and related service, technology, telco/internet, and consumer electronics companies to advise them on emerging technology-related opportunities, project out where entertainment will be in the 3-5 year timeframe, connect them with start-ups and communities of interest, help accelerate adoption of promising technologies, and work to drive standardization and avoid format wars. Learn more at www.ETCenter.org and www.PhilipLelyveld.com .
His IM Initiative works to influence the creative, technical, social, and business issues that will shape this new, emerging art form. Phil is working on the rapidly evolving ecosystem at the convergence of immersive media, IoT, AI, and blockchain.
Phil currently produces the Immersive Media Challenge, which asks students and recent graduates to think like futurists; what experience would they like to create that they can’t easily create now but expect to be able to create in 3-5 years, what needs to happen to make it possible, and articulate why their assumptions that those things will happen are reasonable.
Philip has produced events that brought communities of hands-on practitioners together to discuss and document the current states of ‘the emerging language of VR storytelling,’ ‘live VR production workflow,’ ‘the business of VR,’ and ‘Spatial Audio,’ as well as AR Salons. He presented ‘The Dark Side of AR’ at Augmented World Expo, ‘Legal Questions Raised by Immersive Media’ at the Law and Culture in Virtual Worlds Conf. at Case Western Law School, Entertainment Technology and ‘fake news’ before the European Union at their 2018 commission hearing; “Preserving Democracy in the Digital Age” and to the NATO Strategic Communications leadership, and “Think like a (f)uturist” at Siggraph 2019 as a keynote speaker.
Prior to joining the ETC@USC Mr. Lelyveld spent 10 years coordinating multi-business unit and multi-studio efforts related to entertainment technology including technical lead in major negotiations as Disney’s corporate VP of Digital Industry Relations. He has a BS in Civil Engineering (Tufts), an MS in Applied Geophysics (Stanford), and an MBA (UCLA).
