Hammerhead VR, the British studio which has released consumer content such as ABE and Syren as well as commissioned experiences like Virtual Viking – The Ambush is going to merge with its sister company, volumetric studio Dimension under one brand.
The move will place both companies under the Dimension brand from now on, whilst continuing the work they’re known for. Hammerhead was founded in 2014 as an immersive content studio, producing a variety of experiences as the industry grew. Then in 2017 Hammerhead created Dimension in partnership with Digital Catapult and Microsoft as a state-of-the-art volumetric capture and digital humans studio.
Currently comprised of four studios, including two mobile film stages operating internationally, at its London, UK base Dimension has a 106 camera stage which has been used for Hammerhead’s VR work as well as productions including Madonna’s hologram performance at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards.
“Our studios have always collaborated on productions and have a great shared culture but are increasingly being engaged end-to-end on immersive and location-based entertainment productions as one team. In recognition of this and our exciting roadmap for the next generation of volumetric and XR content, we’ve decided the time is right to focus everything under Dimension,” explained Simon Windsor, Co-Founder and Joint Managing Director of Dimension in a statement. “Future products and productions launched will be Dimension.”
Jeremy Silver, CEO, Digital Catapult adds: “Three years ago, as part of our ongoing strategy to help boost the UK’s immersive content creation sector, Digital Catapult launched Dimension with Hammerhead VR as the first commercial volumetric capture studio in Europe, collaborating closely with Microsoft’s mixed reality studio. Today, combining real-time immersive production capabilities and volumetric performance capture operations under the single banner of Dimension signals the maturing of this sector. We continue to be excited by how this story is developing and how immersive mixed reality technologies are paving the way for future formats and experiences as well as extending what is possible in current mass-market film and tv formats, delivering increased flexibility, time savings and increases in quality.”
One of Hammerhead’s most well renown VR experiences was horror short ABE way back in 2016. Last year the company confirmed work had begun on expanding the ABE universe into three parts, a videogame, a film short and a location-based entertainment (LBE) experience. The studio has confirmed that these are scheduled to be released later in 2020. For further updates from Dimension, keep reading VRFocus.
