When movie director Brett Leonard made “Lawnmower Man” in 1992, the premise of the science-fiction film was quite a stretch on the believability scale. A simple-minded gardener develops telekinetic powers and controls the world’s most powerful computer systems after participating in virtual reality games.

Made for an absurdly low budget of $5 million, the film went on to make $250 million and was the top independent movie of the year. And Leonard continues to remain interested in VR, decades after his film gave the technology a popular cultural platform.

“He thinks VR creation for entertainment is much more like creating a Disney theme park, a world that you can inhabit and be a part of and have fun for hours or days at a time,” said Tony Parisi (pictured), global head of VR and augmented reality at Unity Technologies Inc. “It’s mind-blowing where this could go.”

Parisi visited the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Accenture Technology Vision event in San Francisco this week and spoke with host Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick). They discussed previous work in the VR space, the impact of the technology on the overall user experience, and enterprise uses that could materialize in the near future.

Unity is a game development company, specializing in 2-D, 3-D, VR and AR experiences. Parisi has been involved in VR and AR for the better part of the last two decades. “It’s just been great to see the resurgence of VR,” he said. “We had experiments 20 years ago trying to turn this into a consumer technology. It really wasn’t ready yet.”

Viewers watch Olympics in VR

It’s ready now. At the Olympic Winter Games in South Korea, a Eurosport VR app allowed users to view a multitude of sports in VR. NBC and Intel Corp. announced plans to stream 30 Olympic events in VR over a two-week period.

“It is 3-D graphics, it is graphics that represent objects, environments, places, people, in a way that’s much more realistic, much more intuitive for an end-user to grasp,” Parisi said. “It touches us and our brains in a place that a flat screen doesn’t so we remember it better or learn it more effectively.”

It’s also possible to envision wider adoption of VR in the enterprise, as headset gear becomes more affordable and the cost of production begins to drop. Automakers could use the technology to build car prototypes in VR instead of the time-consuming and costly process of creating clay models today, something that Parisi believes will happen in the near future.

“They want to replace that with purely virtual and digital processes at some point,” Parisi said. “That’s going to radically transform things sometime in the next five to 10 years.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Accenture Technology Vision event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE