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A New Way To Watch Animation Movies With Virtual Reality

Tom Sanocki is a Princeton scholar and former Pixar character artist having worked on the famous Finding Nemo and Toy Story movies amongst various others. He started his career with Pixar shortly after graduating and during his time there, learned many valuables lessons and techniques in the world of animation.

Owen Castellanos
Owen CastellanosHardware & Gaming Reporter
2 min read
A New Way To Watch Animation Movies With Virtual Reality

Tom Sanocki is a Princeton scholar and former Pixar character artist having worked on the famous Finding Nemo and Toy Story movies amongst various others. He started his career with Pixar shortly after graduating and during his time there, learned many valuables lessons and techniques in the world of animation. Sanocki is one of the few lucky people in this world that love the work that they do, and this is clearly reflected in his art.

One of the reasons he enjoyed working at Pixar so much was that every day was a new challenge and Sanocki is a problem solver if nothing else. He loved the flexibility and freedom of solving a problem by making up the methods as they went along. One of his most successful achievements involved creating one of Finding Nemo’s most memorable scenes.

Sanocki has also worked on Pixar’s Ratatouille, Brave, and Cars movies before moving onto Bungie as its character design lead. Here he worked on one of the most successful sci-fi MMO, Destiny as well as various other projects over several years. But once the game had been developed, he was bored again. The challenge was gone.

However, one night Sanocki received a phone call from Max Planck, a ten year veteran of Pixar and a lifelong colleague asking him to try out his latest toy. It was a VR headset being marketed through Kickstarter and was called the Oculus Rift. Upon testing this incredible device Sanocki was hooked and eventually when he was able to depart from Bungie, he once again jumped ship in April 2015. But, this time, he jumped into his own business and founded Limitless Ltd – a company that is devoted to a pioneering animation of the future.

Sanocki’s first real product made through Limitless Ltd was a seven minute long VR film called Gary the Gull. It’s an interactive project that features a fast-talking seagull that tries to steal your food. Gary can respond to words and motion and can capture the audience’s attention with his interactiveness.

Because of his love for this game, Sanocki has created a cloud-based suite of tools for others to use for VR animation and is called the Creative Environment. As well as pre-loaded images, artists can also upload their creations and begin to build their adventure almost immediately.


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Owen Castellanos

Owen Castellanos

Hardware & Gaming Reporter

Owen Castellanos is the Hardware & Gaming Reporter at TrendinTech, where he tests graphics cards, processors, consoles and peripherals and follows the games industry, from the major publishers to independent studios. He previously wrote reviews and benchmarks for Tom's Hardware and contributed features to PC Gamer, covering everything from laptop testing to the economics of game development. Owen holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and attends CES in Las Vegas, Computex in Taipei and the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco each year to meet chipmakers and developers. He writes for readers who want to know whether a product is worth the money, and he is not shy about saying when it is not.

All stories by Owen Castellanos (252)