Jessica Brillhart

Jessica Brillhart is a filmmaker, writer and theorist of immersive media, known for her work on virtual reality filmmaking. She joined Google in 2009 as a filmmaker in its Creative Lab and moved to the company's VR team in 2015, where she was the first person to field test the 16-camera prototype of the Jump camera rig and directed World Tour, the first VR film made with the Jump ecosystem. As Google's principal filmmaker for VR she published "In the Blink of a Mind", a series of essays on editing and attention in VR, and described an editing approach she called probabilistic experiential editing.

After leaving Google she founded the studio Vrai Pictures, whose spatial audio platform Traverse, developed with Superbright for Bose's audio augmented reality platform, debuted at SXSW in 2019. From September 2019 she directed the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. MIT Technology Review named her to its 2017 Innovators Under 35 list. A 2025 biography for the Sloan Film Summit lists her as executive creative director at Hecho Studios and as founder and director of Vrai Pictures.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Career dates, roles, works, quotes, essay dates, credits and awards checked against each cited source. About review dates.

Education

Brillhart graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

Career

Google Creative Lab

Brillhart joined Google in 2009 as the company's first filmmaker and made short films and documentaries as part of the Google Creative Lab. In a February 2016 interview she said she had been a filmmaker at Google for six years when the engineers who built the Jump camera invited her to work with it.

Jump and World Tour

In 2015 Brillhart joined the Google Cardboard team. She was the first person to field test the 16-camera Jump rig that served as the prototype for the GoPro Odyssey. Jump combined the camera rig with cloud processing and YouTube, stitching 16 channels of 4K video into stereoscopic 360-degree video. With the prototype rig she shot World Tour in Iceland, Japan, Puerto Rico and California. The film was built around contrasting conditions on Earth (hot, cold, wet, crowded) and was inspired by a Kurt Vonnegut passage that begins "Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth." According to MIT Technology Review, World Tour was the first film made with the Jump system.

Her second VR project, Resonance, followed violinist Tim Fain through different sonic environments and used doors and portals to move the viewer between scenes. In UploadVR's June 2016 account, Brillhart had produced 750 shots, more than 3 million frames of stitched footage, in the year since she received an early Jump prototype. She told UploadVR that automatic stitching mattered because stitching "has always been this really annoying time suck for VR creators."

Editing theory and essays

Brillhart's first assembly of World Tour, edited in Seattle in May 2015 with conventional frame-to-frame techniques, seemed promising until she watched it in a headset, where the cuts became jarring and the layered music and voiceover distracting. She described the failure, and her conclusion that editing in VR should be treated as moving "world-to-world" rather than "frame-to-frame", in "In the Blink of a Mind - Prologue", whose title and opening quotation refer to Walter Murch's book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye. The series continued with "Attention" (February 2016) and "Engagement" (July 2016) in the Medium publication The Language of VR. An earlier essay, "How to Greet a Rebel: Unlocking the Storyteller in VR" (December 2015), argued that creators should treat a visitor's freedom to look away as an asset rather than try to force attention onto one part of the scene, using a scene from Resonance as its example.

In an October 2015 Filmmaker Magazine interview she described "probabilistic experiential editing", an approach built around points of interest, the places in a 360-degree shot where a viewer is likely to be looking, so that a cut can respond to where attention probably is. Speaking at EmTech MIT in 2016, she said that a 360-degree VR film "is actually a range of potential stories rather than a single story" and showed the circular diagrams she began using while editing World Tour, in which circles stand for worlds and dots mark where a visitor is most likely to enter and leave each one. UploadVR summarized her advice as reframing shots around points of interest that can be cued with spatial audio, and treating the camera as a character with its own identity and height. In a 2017 interview with Jason Pontin she called VR "an embodied medium", referred to conventional films as "flatties", and said that "VR is its own medium. It's not going to hurt any other medium."

Later Google projects

At Sheffield Doc/Fest in June 2017 Brillhart presented Voyager VR, made up of two experiences: Beethoven's Fifth, set in an orchestra's practice room, and Navajo Nation. Beethoven's Fifth was a collaboration between Daydream, the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, NASA and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, drew on material from the Voyager Golden Record, featured conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, and used ambisonic audio; it was shown at SXSW in 2018. In a 2019 interview she described reimagining Golden Record material for VR in collaboration with Ann Druyan. At Google she also made a VR experiment based on the DeepDream machine learning project, and her VR work has covered subjects including the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey team.

Vrai Pictures and Traverse

By August 2017, MIT Technology Review described Brillhart as an independent filmmaker who had previously been Google's principal filmmaker for VR. Her studio, Vrai Pictures, was based in New York in March 2019 and later in Los Angeles; Brillhart said its name combines the letters VR and AI and the French word vrai ("true").

Traverse, developed with the studio Superbright, debuted at SXSW in March 2019. It lets a listener walk through a spatial mix of a multitrack recording, so that moving toward or away from each instrument changes what is heard. Demonstrations used a spatial mix of Elvis Presley's "Power of My Love", and another let a listener hear and see the Martian landscape on a phone using publicly available audio and imagery. At launch it required Bose QC35 II headphones or Bose Frames, whose motion sensors fed Bose's AR platform. Vrai Pictures credits Bose and Vrai Pictures as producers, Antfood and Mach1 for audio, and lists Elvis Presley Enterprises, Sony Legacy, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Sony Classical and Yo-Yo Ma among the collaborators; besides SXSW, the platform was selected for the Tribeca Film Festival and Sonar+D. At SXSW 2019 the Virtual Cinema jury gave a Special Jury Recognition for "The Future of Experience", which Vrai Pictures lists as a Special Jury Prize for Traverse. Brillhart also gave the festival's Convergence Keynote that year.

Vrai Pictures also lists Rio de Los Angeles (2019), a bilingual augmented reality app directed by Brillhart and developed by Superbright about the history of the 51-mile Los Angeles River system, with Frank Gehry, OLAN and River LA listed as collaborators and Verizon and RYOT as executive producers. The studio was one of the partners on Dustin Yellin's AR artwork Procession, which debuted at the Tribeca Festival in June 2021, and is credited with creative advisement and production on Sam Green and JD Samson's 7 Sounds (2021), an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and SXSW.

USC Institute for Creative Technologies

On June 25, 2019, the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) announced Brillhart as director of its Mixed Reality Lab, effective September 16, 2019. She said she planned to continue "MxR's tradition of pushing experiential design forward by developing impactful tools, systems and experiences that are as functional as they are inclusive, accessible, emotional, and meaningful." In a USC Viterbi Magazine interview she named inclusive design and accessibility as the lab's priorities and summarized her approach as "Visitors, not viewers. Worlds, not frames." Her studio's biography states that she oversaw research for the Army Research Lab, the Office of Naval Research and DARPA for three years.

Hecho Studios

The 2025 Sloan Film Summit biography describes her ICT role in the past tense and lists her as an executive creative director at Hecho Studios while she continues to run Vrai Pictures.

Recognition

Year	Recognition	Source
2017	MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35, Pioneers category
2019	SXSW Virtual Cinema Special Jury Recognition, "The Future of Experience" (credited to Traverse by Vrai Pictures)
2019	Advanced Imaging Society Distinguished Leadership Award, one of ten women honored at the society's 10th annual Entertainment Technology Awards on October 28, 2019

See also

• Cinematic VR
• 360 Video
• Jump
• Spatial audio