"Elvis is incredible," Brillhart said in an interview ahead of the show. "In the beginning, I didn't have an opinion ... What's interesting about him is his presence and his performance, which we don't have anymore. There's no actual feeling of being around him. A lot of folks that got really excited about him saw him live ... It wasn't a pristine thing, they saw his nuances."

With Traverse, Brillhart aims to replicate that sense of presence by dropping you into the middle of an Elvis performance. In a brief demonstration, I donned a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones and followed the Traverse app's instructions to map an open space in my office. When I hit play, I was surrounded by the opening guitar riff of "Suspicious Minds" and, almost immediately, took a step back as I heard Elvis belting vocals right in front of me. As I walked around, it was almost like I was moving among the ghosts of Elvis and his crew -- if I really wanted to focus on the drums or horns, I just had to move left or right. And when I turned around, every bit of the song moved with me.

When she launched Vrai Pictures last year, Brillhart said she had the idea that "tech is a tool and not a goal." While we've seen plenty of interesting VR experiments, she believes the goal of the industry is to do more than just make cool stuff. "No one asked for VR," she said when I asked if she's worried about the cooling public response to virtual reality. "Vrai has the letters VR and AI in it, but in French it means 'true.' And so the idea that there is something that all of these immersive technologies are trying to get us to, I think that's the interesting part."