Walt Disney Animation Studios, the group behind animated classics like The Little Mermaid (1989), The Lion King (1994), and newer blockbusters like Moana (2016), is set to debut its first VR short film next month at the SIGGRAPH 2018 conference in Vancouver.

The VR short film, titled Cycles, will be centered around a singular family home and the stories that happen therein, reports Variety. While Disney, a sprawling corporation, has experimented with VR across several divisions—Pixar’s Coco VR experience and Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, to name a few—this will be the first VR short film to come from Walt Disney Animation Studios itself.

Image courtesy Disney

The film will be directed by Jeff Gibson, who has worked as a lightning artist at Disney Animation Studios since 2013. Variety reports that the studio took an experimental storyboarding approach, using motion capture and VR artwork tools like Quill to pre-visualize the film before starting into production proper.

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The film will debut at SIGGRAPH 2018 next month, but there’s no word yet on when it might see a public release.

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."