China’s most famous film director just founded a new VR brand

Photo via Pixabay.

With VR headsets like the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and PlayStation VR about to hit the mainstream, it seems that the entertainment industry is finally fixing its eyes on the VR market. And in China, one of that industry’s brightest stars, Zhang Yimou, has just founded a new VR brand.

Zhang Yimou is a film director and cinematographer who first hit the big time in the late 1980s and 1990s with beautiful, heartfelt films like Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, and Raise the Red Lantern. More recently, you may know him as the man behind blockbuster action films like Hero and House of Flying Daggers, or as the guy who directed and orchestrated the insanely-entertaining opening ceremony at the 2008 Beijing 2008 Olympics. His films have been nominated for the best foreign picture Academy Award three times, and though he’s never won, he has taken home several other major industry prizes, including the Jury Grand Prize at Cannes and the Golden Bear at Berlin.

Now, he’s bringing his talents to bear on virtual reality.

According to China Radio International, Zhang has announced a plan to collaborate with Chinese VR content company Danghong Qitian on a new virtual reality content brand called SoReal. From early descriptions, it sounds like the company will create offline VR experiences in real-world locations so that users can interact with a custom-built virtual world that’s “wrapped” over a physical space. If that’s the case it will have competitors – Shanda, for example, is already working on a VR theme park like that – but there are few details about SoReal yet, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Zhang hasn’t totally made the switch over to VR; he’s still hard at work in the world of celluloid, and has a new film called The Great Wall scheduled for release this year that stars Andy Lau, Matt Damon, Willem Defoe, and Pedro Pascal. But the film is reported to be a visually impressive science-fantasy movie, so perhaps we’ll soon see some VR content from SoReal that’s set in The Great Wall’s universe. We can hope!