Ollie Rankin

Ollie Rankin is a New Zealand born virtual reality and visual effects pioneer. His background in programming and specifically the field of artificial intelligence led him to be hired at Weta Digital in 1999, as one of the first users of Massive, building virtual orc and elf brains and choreographing battle sequences for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This expertise in the emerging field of crowd and battle simulation was sought after by studios in Japan, California, the UK and Canada. By 2009, Rankin was working as VFX Supervisor at Method Studios in Vancouver where he founded Pansensory Interactive, a virtual reality and real-time digital entertainment production company. He produced two of the first and largest-scale virtual music festivals during COVID and has been involved in several startups in the fields of virtual and mixed reality, including making contributions to volumetric performance capture technology as well as the application of VR to education and mental health therapy. The interactive VR film "Downloaded", which Rankin wrote and directed, premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and was named by Forbes in the 50 best XR experiences of the year. In 2020 he helmed the virtual production animated short, "Orthogonal", which won multiple festival awards, including Best Animation. He currently lives in Vancouver where he splits his time between continuing to innovate live entertainment in the metaverse and advocating for diversity, fairness and sustainability through his non-profit "United Humans Foundation".