1) Read papers about this stuff, attend conferences about this stuff, and try to implement some of it yourself. For this particular set of techniques, SIGGRAPH is a good conference to attend and their proceedings are full of good papers to read.
2) Make a project that uses some of these techniques on your own. It can be open source, or it can be an app you sell on your favorite app store, or whatever. It doesn't really matter.
3) Look for a new job that uses some of this stuff. You don't have to jump right into working at Facebook or Google. There are smaller companies out there that do this type of stuff.
My story is that I was working for a company that sold large database services to large retailers. It paid pretty well, but was boring as hell. After working for a few years and saving up, I looked for a job doing the stuff I was interested in. I found one. It didn't work out and I quit after 4 months. But the next one! The next one worked out! It was a bunch of image processing stuff. They were a small company and needed someone with some graphics experience. I had never shipped anything graphics related, but I had written a bunch of graphics tools for fun for myself to learn how it all worked. It was enough to get the job. My pay probably stayed the same for 2 years as I went from job to job, but my happiness increased. After 3 or 4 years at the company, I left and started my own company doing graphics work. I did that for about 5 years and eventually decided to go work for one of the big companies that's doing cool stuff with this.
1) Read papers about this stuff, attend conferences about this stuff, and try to implement some of it yourself. For this particular set of techniques, SIGGRAPH is a good conference to attend and their proceedings are full of good papers to read.
2) Make a project that uses some of these techniques on your own. It can be open source, or it can be an app you sell on your favorite app store, or whatever. It doesn't really matter.
3) Look for a new job that uses some of this stuff. You don't have to jump right into working at Facebook or Google. There are smaller companies out there that do this type of stuff.
My story is that I was working for a company that sold large database services to large retailers. It paid pretty well, but was boring as hell. After working for a few years and saving up, I looked for a job doing the stuff I was interested in. I found one. It didn't work out and I quit after 4 months. But the next one! The next one worked out! It was a bunch of image processing stuff. They were a small company and needed someone with some graphics experience. I had never shipped anything graphics related, but I had written a bunch of graphics tools for fun for myself to learn how it all worked. It was enough to get the job. My pay probably stayed the same for 2 years as I went from job to job, but my happiness increased. After 3 or 4 years at the company, I left and started my own company doing graphics work. I did that for about 5 years and eventually decided to go work for one of the big companies that's doing cool stuff with this.
You can do this. It just takes time and effort.