Makers of The Metaverse: Dane Smith Of The Third Floor On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality Industries

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Understand that the majority of benefit one gets from communication is listening.

The Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality Industries are so exciting. What is coming around the corner? How will these improve our lives? What are the concerns we should keep an eye out for? Aside from entertainment, how can VR or AR help work or other parts of life? To address this, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dane Smith.

As Chief Strategy Officer (CSO), Dane Smith oversees The Third Floor’s implementation of previsualization, virtual production, and real-time content creation. Dane works closely with the CEO and organizational leaders to develop, execute, and sustain key strategic initiatives in the company. He has served as a catalyst for The Third Floor’s expansion into a widening hub of visualization services, creating strategic alliances with companies working in film, television, games, virtual production, and location-based entertainment.

Translating market intelligence into action, Dane brings world-class visualization solutions to clients. He has managed over 100 studio projects, including Academy Award Winning film Anomalisa, Avengers: Endgame, and Game of Thrones. As an early adopter and influencer in immersive technology, he continues to mentor and educate the next generation of digital artists. Dane serves as a faculty member at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects and a managing member of the VES, BAFTA, The Academy of Television Arts, and The Producers Guild of America.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory and how you grew up?

I’m Canadian and I grew up on Air Force bases across Canada. My dad was an engineer stationed to work at NORAD. He had a computer programming and science background, so that’s the culture I grew up in.

When I was growing up in the ’70s, there was a lot of experimentation going on in film. One of the first movies I saw, probably at a very inappropriately young age, was Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at a drive in. I was smuggled in from the back seat. That just set the stage for me. Since then, creating content, creating film, technical problem solving, that’s always been of interest to me.

During school, I bought a small 8mm camera and started doing stop-motion animation in my basement. Today, I’m the Chief Strategy Officer at a visualization company called The Third Floor, where we are popularizing new techniques and technologies that are transforming popular entertainment production.

I came to the creative media industry later in life, after gaining experience first in two other industries. I originally entered this business casually, to help someone, but it quickly became obvious to me that this was what I was meant to do. Now I’ve been doing it for 20 years.

I arrived here through random circumstances, going to a Burning Man decompression party in Venice Beach that I really didn’t want to go to, but I couldn’t get out of. I met a digital artist there, and it changed the course of my life. So my advice is this: It’s never too late, never stop seeking, never make finite decisions about where life is going to take you. Because you just never know.

Is there a particular book, film, or podcast that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I would point to the 1972 film Silent Running starring Bruce Dern, about the isolation of space, the environment, and technology, as well as what the future may hold. Science fiction that’s very grounded in real science has always gripped me.

Is there a particular story that inspired you to pursue a career in the X Reality industry? We’d love to hear it.

I was involved in the early days of visualization and all the innovation that came along with AR, VR, and extended reality. As an early advocate and proponent of the technology, I saw huge promise in it.

In 2016, I felt stagnant with the things I was doing in visual effects and was considering leaving the field. I had decided to retreat to Hawaii and surf before returning to Los Angeles to decide on my next chapter. While away, a producer kept calling me with a project — an opportunity to work on a dome theme park in Hainan, China. They were so persistent that I decided to ask for very specific conditions, so that if I did end up accepting, I would be in an ideal environment. I asked for something that I thought it would be impossible: Get Mark Dippé to be the Creative Director.

Mark Dippé created the digital dinosaurs in the original Jurassic Park. He’s a hero of mine, and I had never met him, but I was enamored with his work. He and his team basically architected the digital world of content creation that we live in today, and I just thought it would be fascinating to work with them. Somehow, the producer got a contract with Mark and I took the project. As soon as Mark looked at the content, he said, “we have to do this in VR.”

This led to my first experience looking at content in a VR headset, a transformative moment. I immediately knew this tool was a portal to collaboration that could break barriers of geographic location, cost, and the linear process. I was working inside a CAD file that represented a structure that was not yet built, adjusting animations to meet the structure’s spatial requirements with my animators in Seoul — all from my studio in Santa Monica. Time, space and even language barriers dropped; we were working in real time. I saw a vision of the future.

And that began my second love affair with visual effects and content creation. Going on that journey with Mark opened my eyes to the promise of this new way of creating content. It inspired me so much that I founded a company to do VR and AR, as a B2B design service.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this fascinating career?

I was on hiatus over Christmas in 2019, shopping at a grocery store with a misbehaving toddler on my arm, when my cell phone rang. The caller was Kanye West. He was on a mission to solve housing problems, and at the time California was ravaged by wildfires, a crisis that had touched him personally. He saw the connection between poverty, lack of resources and damage to our environment, and felt compelled to solve it.

He came to our studio an hour after the call. Kanye was concerned that no one could take his vision and put it on display to invite collaboration. He needed someone to manifest that vision digitally. The Third Floor provides this service to media clients: We take your ideas, build a digital replica, and invite subject matter experts to vet the result. There are no restrictive costs or limits to the process.

A couple of hours after that, I was on his private jet with Tyler The Creator, an architect, The Third Floor’s CEO Chris Edwards, our wives and Chief of Staff Lauren Moore en route to the MOCA Museum in Massachusetts.

We met with James Turrell, learned about the Roden Crater, flew back across America, and started a year-long journey working on an architectural visualization project. Our services were ideal for his purposes — our process, XR and our crew helped move the project forward.

The project was aimed at making the world a better place, keeping people in third world nations housed, and addressing the environment. And it was just something that one wouldn’t expect doing this work. The whole experience was surreal.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I had made an animated film that was well-received by critics but couldn’t find distribution. We decided to convert it to stereoscopic 3D. This was during the run-up to Avatar when the idea of stereoscopic 3D films was really new. We went to every stereo event we could, we went to this tiny theater in Beverly Hills to see the stereo demo. James Cameron was there and he showed a conversion of Titanic and talked about stereo. The investors to whom I owed millions of dollars — and there was no sign they were ever going to see a return on that investment — were sitting right behind me.

Cameron left and there’s one empty seat in the theater. A few minutes later, someone comes in the dark and sits beside me. I look over and it’s Jim Cameron!

I spent the next 10 minutes thinking, “I have to ask this guy for help.” How do I approach him? Is it “Mr. Cameron?” Is it “Jim?” Is that too familiar? I mean, my mind was just reeling. And remember, I’ve got the investors sitting behind me and now they know Jim Cameron’s sitting right there.

I just worked up the courage and leaned in and said, “I’m making an animated film. We’re interested in converting it to stereo to get released. Can I pick your brain?” When he was on stage, he’d said, “if anybody needs any help, let me know.” But would he, really?

He pulled back and looked at me. I thought he was just going to blast me for interrupting the presentation. Instead, he gave me his name and number, returned my emails, and was a tremendous help.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I am going to call out Baker Bloodworth, who is now semi-retired and runs a bed and breakfast in Italy. He was a producer at Disney who invited me into the process of mapping out the festival circuit for a film called Destino. Destino was a series of oil paintings Salvador Dali did in the middle of the last century while Disney was offering him shelter from all the trouble that was going on in Europe during World War 2. The paintings were left in the archives for many years, but Baker came up with an algorithm that wrote in-between animations, which turned the paintings into a short animated film.

Because I was involved in animation at the time, we met each other socially. I was getting a lot of attention and awards for my animations, so he would occasionally ask me for my advice.

One day, he invited me over to look at the final edit of Destino. I was a few minutes late and snuck into the back row in the dark and sat down. It was a beautiful film and ended up winning an Oscar; it was phenomenal. When the lights went on, he introduced me to a lot of important people, including Roy Disney, who was in the audience that day.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We’re working on a lot of exciting projects, and part of that has included bringing new and superior AR/VR technologies to creative teams and crews, including some that are used every day. The Third Floor has developed Cyclops, a tool for directors and crews to point a handheld tablet anywhere on the set or location, then see a storytelling digital asset, character or backdrop superimposed into the shot instead of having to imagine the placement and action of a CG creature. With another tool, Chimera, teams wearing AR headsets can walk around and be immersed within sets they have not physically constructed for collaborative design reviews. And they can use VR to scout locations and sets virtually from wherever they are. Our innovative mixed reality tools are changing how entertainment is created, empowering creatives to bring their most ambitious visions to many different types of screens and devices.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. The VR, AR and MR industries seem so exciting right now. What are the 3 things in particular that most excite you about the industry? Can you explain or give an example?

The three things that excite me the most are areas that have not yet been tapped into: Museums, Education, and the Metaverse.

Computers, social media, streaming and COVID have combined to put us all in digital cocoons. For countless generations, humans have sat around fires telling stories. We’ve now digitized that process, but we crave social interaction. It actually benefits the stories and the legacy of those stories to have human interaction.

We’re about to see mixed reality technologies usher in a new era of human connection, enhanced by digital capabilities. It will be very different than what we have today, where people are isolated.

What are the 3 things that concern you about the VR, AR and MR industries? Can you explain? What can be done to address those concerns?

Three things that concern me about these industries are (1) misinterpretation by early adopters, (2) public experimentation, and (3) the media’s tendency to find more traction sometimes with negative stories.

People who are less informed about the details of these industries will get stuck on the negatives. We saw that happen with stereoscopic 3D movies. There were a couple of releases that were rushed and didn’t do well at the box office; then all 3D movies got painted with that brush: “it’s a shoddy attempt by Hollywood to upsell tickets.” In fact, stereoscopic 3D is actually a beautiful art form. Anyone who’s uncertain or disagrees with that, I would suggest looking up Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams — a good starting place for recognizing stereoscopic 3D as an art form. I’m concerned about that brush being applied to what we’re doing today.

But the response is already happening organically: There’s a lot of compelling content being developed using VR, AR, and MR technologies, starting with The Mandalorian. There are many others that are using these technologies. And the stories are connecting with audiences in ways that make them curious about what’s going on behind the curtain. So I think we’re making the case, and I’m optimistic that we’re going to succeed with audiences.

I think the entertainment aspects of VR, AR and MR are apparent. Can you share with our readers how these industries can help us at work?

Thanks to these industries, we now have secure, robust and visually persistent technology that allows me to work in real time with anyone around the globe. The obvious benefits are connecting teams without the environmental damage jets cause — the cost that comes along with it. But there are secondary benefits as well: If you’re a very talented production designer, you could come in and advise on my film for an hour, because you don’t have to get on a jet, and don’t have to fly anywhere. I can show you the film’s environment in a visually persistent way, so your contribution has value.

What that will usher in is a democratization of this technology. Students, people without access to expensive equipment or connections in Hollywood, will suddenly get access to these opportunities.

Education is really where it’s going to begin. I teach a class at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, Games and Animation as a part-time adjunct professor, alongside my full-time role as CSO at The Third Floor. In teaching that class for 10 years, I’ve had an amazing slate of guest lecturers. My previous visual effects class has had some industry luminaries, but the access to VIP industry leaders and their willingness to meet and encourage students tells me something is accelerating — most of the graduates from the program are now working in the field. This is a very exciting time with a lot of opportunities.

Are there other ways that VR, AR and MR can improve our lives? Can you explain?

Yes, I think there are huge advantages in offering experiences to people who are often marginalized or shut out because of finance, proximity, or other reasons that aren’t socially just. Imagine taking a group of underprivileged kids to the Louvre on Thursday afternoon, without getting on a jet or having to travel to France. VR can take you there — you can go on a hosted tour. That opportunity can be offered to people in rural or impoverished areas, and those who don’t have the means to travel.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about working in your industry? Can you explain what you mean?

The visual effects and mixed reality industries have become a lot more inclusive over the last 20 years, but many people don’t realize how much has changed. Both industries have roots in the military and aerospace industries — those were the folks who had access to the Silicon Graphics workstations and early tools that could create computer-generated imagery. Back in the ’50s and ’60s, it was a different era: Dad went to work and mom stayed home, so it was a male-dominated industry to start with. Since people tended to hire people who looked and behaved like they did, this dominance continued longer than it should have.

When I look at our studio floor today, especially with remote working, it perfectly represents the world outside, and we are wonderfully diverse. There’s still work to do, but in visual effects and gaming, I feel like huge strides were made in the last 20 years. You don’t hear enough about the massive shifts — you tend to hear more about the negativity.

What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career In The VR, AR or MR Industries?”

1. A sense of personal accomplishment that comes from problem solving. I’ve seen people very rapidly promoted to the highest levels of our industry — working directly with directors — because of that joy of problem solving. It’s about not having your motivation be money or attention, but rather knowing in your heart that something can be solved, and putting in the effort to solve it.
2. When I’m working and don’t notice time passing — that’s something I should look at doing for a living. The people who are successful in computer graphics, VR, AR, and XR are people who check that box with problem solving. When there’s something I need to do, I know it can be done. The more people tell me it’s impossible, the more determined I am to solve it. And when I solve it, the satisfaction of solving it is reward enough.
3. Understand that the majority of benefit one gets from communication is listening.
4. Mentorship from people who have access to power.
5. An innate understanding of where your strengths and weaknesses are. As an industry, we’re really good at self-policing: There are some amazing journalists, including Noah Kadner, Ian Failes and others, who are doing a fantastic job of documenting the industry’s weekly ebbs and flows, and that information is widely shared. Successful people need to do the same for themselves.
6. The discipline to shore up your weaknesses. Learn and practice what you’re not good at.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

What would inspire the most amount of good for the most amount of people would be clearly demonstrating — to teens who are in school — the opportunities that now exist in this industry, as the barriers of gender, color, influence, and wealth don’t exist to the degree that they once did. We need advocates and people spending time volunteering to get this message out.

I would inspire a global movement to focus on early intervention and education: to point out that a career in mixed reality is possible, and not something you should believe is a pipe dream. I would also want to get it through to parents that this is possible.

In my opinion, the one thing America does better than any other country in the world is create and distribute compelling stories with new technology. You can find someone better at just about everything else we claim to do best, but American “cool” is our global export: Hip hop, IP, stories — you go anywhere in the world, and there’s a global fascination with American IP, or IP that has blossomed through America. I think it’s incredibly important for people from diverse backgrounds to share their stories and cultures with the world.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

Elon Musk is one of the most influential people in the world right now because of his innovation footprint. I would like students, as an early intervention, to see how his passion and the way that he does business lead to all of the opportunities he’s now creating. We need to reverse the course of the dialogue about his success, and push “how he approaches challenges” into the hands of educators.

Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success on your great work!