Robert Stromberg

Robert Stromberg is a production designer, visual effects artist and film director who co-founded The Virtual Reality Company (VRC), a Los Angeles content studio for virtual reality experiences that was founded in 2014. He shared the Academy Award for Art Direction for Avatar at the 82nd Academy Awards in 2010 and won it again for Alice in Wonderland at the 83rd Academy Awards in 2011. He made his feature directing debut with Disney's Maleficent in 2014.

At VRC, where he is co-founder and Chief Creative Officer, Stromberg directed THERE, the studio's first original VR release, and The Martian VR Experience for 20th Century Fox's Fox Innovation Lab, and produced the animated VR series pilot Raising a Rukus. The studio also made the location-based VR attraction Jurassic World VR Expedition for Dave & Buster's entertainment centers in 2018.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Checked every claim and quote against the cited Academy ceremony pages, emmy magazine (2018), VFX Voice (2024), VRC's 2015 and 2017 press releases, the VRC website, UploadVR, Road to VR, TheWrap, The Third Floor, AWN, socaltech and GearBrain. About review dates.

Early life

Stromberg's father, William R. Stromberg, wrote, directed and produced the low-budget 1977 feature The Crater Lake Monster and built monsters in the family garage, which Stromberg watched growing up. In a 2024 profile, VFX Voice wrote that he grew up in Carlsbad, California, and that he moved to Los Angeles at 19, where he worked in a parking-lot tollbooth at Universal Studios before becoming a production assistant on the television series Family Ties.

Career

Matte painting and visual effects

Stromberg began as a matte painter. According to VFX Voice, his first film matte paintings were for Journey to the Center of the Earth, after which he worked on A Nightmare on Elm Street and other low-budget horror films; Syd Dutton and Bill Taylor then offered him a full-time job at their company, Illusion Arts. Stromberg told the magazine that he and Dutton created the cities seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. He later set up his own visual effects company, Digital Backlot, and worked as a visual effects supervisor on productions including Game of Thrones, Walk the Line, Memoirs of a Geisha, John Adams and Boardwalk Empire.

The Television Academy's emmy magazine credited him in 2018 with four Emmy Awards for visual effects: one for Star Trek: Voyager, one for John Adams and two for Boardwalk Empire. The 2024 VFX Voice profile gives a total of five Emmy Awards and quotes Stromberg saying that his first was for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Production design

Stromberg was co-production designer of James Cameron's Avatar with Rick Carter. The 82nd Academy Awards, held on 7 March 2010, gave the Art Direction award to Avatar, credited to Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg for production design and Kim Sinclair for set decoration. Describing the work on Pandora, Stromberg told VFX Voice that the team built "for the first time a virtual camera that could do many of the same things that traditional cameras could do", and that "for every scene in Avatar, we created a digital environment that could be explored, scouted and filmed, all virtually."

At the 83rd Academy Awards on 27 February 2011, the Art Direction award went to Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, credited to Robert Stromberg for production design and Karen O'Hara for set decoration. He was also production designer of Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful. After directing Maleficent he returned to production design on The BFG.

Directing

In April 2012, Disney announced that Stromberg, described as an "Academy Award-winning production designer", would direct Maleficent, then scheduled for release on 14 March 2014. According to VFX Voice, producer Joe Roth, who had seen Stromberg's work as production designer of Oz the Great and Powerful, handed him the script, and the film was shot at Pinewood Studios in London. Maleficent was released in 2014 as his directorial debut. In November 2018, emmy magazine reported that he was directing the first two episodes of Project Blue Book, a ten-part History series about the U.S. Air Force's UFO investigations, executive-produced by Robert Zemeckis.

The Virtual Reality Company

Founding

Stromberg told VFX Voice that the turning point was Facebook's purchase of Oculus for $2 billion: "Oculus was nice enough to show me the tests that they had been working on that were compelling enough for Facebook to take notice. Once I saw them, I immediately started The Virtual Reality Company." He added that at the time "everyone was talking about how it could be used for gaming", but he thought "this could be a great narrative storytelling tool". VRC's press releases state that it was founded in 2014 by four Hollywood veterans: Stromberg, Guy Primus, Chris Edwards and Joel Newton. Both releases name Stromberg as co-founder and Chief Creative Officer, and the 2017 release names Primus as chief executive and co-founder.

In July 2015, UploadVR reported that Steven Spielberg had been added to VRC's website as a member of its advisory board and that the company was raising $22.7 million in early funding. At a Technicolor panel during the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, Stromberg said VRC was "working with, for instance, Steven Spielberg on a project that's solely for VR", without describing its content. In June 2016 VRC announced a $23 million financing round. UploadVR reported that the investors included Beijing-based Hengxin Mobile Business Co., Metallica singer James Hetfield, Rothenberg Ventures and Elementum Ventures, and that the company then had about a dozen staff; Road to VR wrote that the Hengxin deal was meant to give VRC a distribution platform in the greater China region.

THERE

Stromberg's first VR work at VRC was a four-minute test he called There, which he described to VFX Voice as a fantastical world in which a young girl leads the viewer through a surreal environment, with dialogue and a symphonic score. VRC's September 2015 announcement called THERE "VRC's first release of its original VR content", directed by Stromberg and intended to be presented as a VR series. Under a partnership announced the same day, IonVR planned to demonstrate its mobile headset with an excerpt from THERE at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on 21 September 2015.

The Martian VR Experience

Stromberg directed The Martian VR Experience, a VR piece based on the film The Martian, made by Fox Innovation Lab with RSA Films and VRC and executive-produced by Scott. The Third Floor, a supplier to Fox, Fox Innovation Lab and VRC, wrote that its artists worked with Stromberg to design and create the CG environments and assets and built the interactive technology in Unreal Engine version 4.13. The viewer takes the role of astronaut Mark Watney, flying to the surface of Mars, steering through zero gravity and driving a rover.

The piece debuted at CES 2016 and was accepted into the Sundance New Frontier program. It received a Cannes Silver Lion in Digital Craft and the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) Next VR Award. Road to VR, which tried it at CES in January 2016, called it a worthy companion to the film rather than a lazy movie tie-in. Fox released it on 15 November 2016 for PlayStation VR and for the HTC Vive on Steam, priced at US$19.99.

Raising a Rukus

Raising a Rukus is an animated VR experience about twins Amy and Jonas and their dog, Rukus, who leads them through a prehistoric world. VRC's press release credits it as produced by Stromberg and VRC, with a pilot directed by Josh Wassung, founder of The Third Floor, in his directing debut. Its writers included Guardians of the Galaxy screenwriter Nicole Perlman; the team also included composer James Newton Howard and Skywalker Sound. The pilot uses a branching narrative: by looking toward Jonas or Amy at a particular point in the story, the viewer follows that character on a different path. VRC's website says Stromberg created the franchise.

VRC announced that it would debut at the IMAX VR Centre in Los Angeles on 19 May 2017. On 25 May 2017 it went on sale for the Samsung Gear VR on the Oculus Store at US$3.99. UploadVR's Jamie Feltham praised its choice system, writing that "we barely realised we were making choices".

Follow Me Dragon and Jurassic World VR Expedition

VRC moved into augmented reality with Follow Me Dragon, a free AR pet app for iOS devices in which a virtual dragon does tricks and follows the user. Stromberg told VFX Voice that it "became a top download in the app store".

Jurassic World VR Expedition was built by VRC with Universal and VRstudios and written and directed by VRC's James Lima. It opened on 14 June 2018 at 112 Dave & Buster's locations as a ride of about five minutes for groups of four players wearing HTC Vive headsets, at US$5 per person. VRC's website says it ran at more than 100 Dave & Buster's centers and calls it "the biggest location-based VR launch to date". Stromberg has named it, The Martian and Raising a Rukus among the narrative experiences VRC created over several years.

Current status

VFX Voice described Stromberg in January 2024 as co-founder of VRC, "a content studio and production company for VR experiences". The company's website, accessed in October 2026, lists him as co-founder and Chief Creative Officer.

VR work

Year	Title	Stromberg's role	Format
2015	THERE	Director	VR piece planned as a series; excerpt demonstrated on the IonVR headset
2016	The Martian VR Experience	Director	Interactive VR for PlayStation VR and HTC Vive
2017	Raising a Rukus	Producer	Animated VR pilot for IMAX VR and Samsung Gear VR
2017	Follow Me Dragon	Co-founder of the developer, VRC	iOS augmented reality app
2018	Jurassic World VR Expedition	Co-founder of the producer, VRC	Location-based VR attraction

See also

• Cinematic VR
• Virtual production
• Location-based virtual reality