Light Field Lab, known for its advancements in light-field display technology, successfully completed a Series A funding round, scoring the firm over $28 million in venture capital to manufacture and distribute working products. The investment round was led by Bosch Venture Capital and Taiwania Capital. Light Field Lab hopes to build large scale light-field displays capable of offering a ‘holodeck’-like experience.
At a cursory glance, light-field displays are essentially holographic panels that, as TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney puts it, are akin to advanced 3D TVs. Unlike 3D TVs, however, light-field displays don’t require special glasses to enjoy the ‘3D’ element.
Initially founded by a group of ex-Lytro employees, Light Field Lab is already notable for having secured $7 million in funding for R&D on light-field displays in January 2018, two months ahead of Lytro’s shuttering.
“The company aims to bring real-world holographic experiences to life with up to hundreds of gigapixels of resolution, including modular video walls for live event and large-scale installations,” states an official release.
The consumer market isn’t likely to see any such light-field display technology in their homes for some time, in favor of a more immediate focus on creating value within the commercial sector—where location-based entertainment sits directly under the crosshair.
Against Gravity, the studio behind the popular social VR game Rec Room, has raised an addition $24 million in venture capital across two investment rounds.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Against Gravity says that it has raised $24 million in venture funding in previously undisclosed Series A and Series B rounds, led by VC firms Sequoia and Index Ventures. This reportedly brings the company’s total venture funding to $29 million.
It’s big news for Against Gravity, which has been increasingly focusing its social VR app Rec Room around user-generated content, and ensuring that the title is available on a wide range of headsets (and soon even mobile devices) allowing friends to connect easily across VR platforms (a point of significant friction between most VR platforms). The company tells TechCrunch that Rec Room is nearing 1 million user-created rooms. Additionally, the company’s emphasis on a family-friendly aesthetic gives it a more general appeal than something like VRChat, another social VR app which serves up subculture vibes.
Still, Facebook is surely a much larger threat to Rec Room than the other way around; like Apple with iOS, Facebook has the option to build deeper social features into the core VR software of its headsets—features which third-party developers aren’t allowed to build—like the ability to connect players across between separate VR applications.
Last month’s launch of Oculus Quest (on which Rec Room has been available since day one) was likely a moment of validation for Against Gravity and potential investors. Among the headsets on which Rec Room is available, Quest is far and away the easiest to use, making Rec Room’s brand of ‘what should we do today?’ fun that much more approachable.
However, Rec Room has been free from the start, and the company is still sorting out its long term monetization strategy, but—like any tech startup—is clearly most focused right now on user growth backed by VC funding.
FitXR, the studio behind BoxVR (2017), today announced that it has raised a $1.25 million seed investment led by Boost VC.
BoxVR is a fitness focused VR boxing rhythm game that’s garnered a positive reception on both Steam and Oculus platforms since its 2017 launch. The studio says that they’ve sold some 50,000 copies of the game and that they’re seeing strong traction from players, with average play sessions upwards of 27 minutes.
With that, the studio has raised a $1.25 million seed investment led by Boost VC, with participation by VC firms Maveron, TenOneTen, and a handful of angel investors. The company says they plan to use the funds to expand operations and accelerate the development of upcoming immersive products focused on fitness. While their first game is available on VR headsets, they expect to also reach into the AR space as it matures.
Image courtesy FitXR
While other VR games can pass as a decent workout, BoxVR makes fitness a primary focus. In the game, players are confronted with an instruction pattern which tasks them with hooking, jabbing, ducking, and weaving to the beat. The game even includes an estimation of calories burned.
According to the Virtual Reality Institute of Health and Exercise, playing BoxVR at its highest workout difficult can burn 6-8 calories per minute, roughly the equivalent of playing tennis. FitXR says that all workouts in the game are choreographed by fitness instructors.
BigBox VR, the VR studio behind the critically-acclaimed multiplayer shooter Smashbox Arena (2016), today announced that it has secured $5 million in a seed funding round led by Shasta Ventures, with additional funding from GSR Ventures and Pioneer Square Labs Ventures.
This brings BigBox VR’s total funding to $6.45 million since its founding in 2016.
BigBox VR was co-founded by game industry entrepreneurs Chia Chin Lee and Gabe Brown, who led successful exits and launched top-grossing products at Valve, Disney, Sony, and Microsoft. With its latest funding round, Jacob Mullins, a partner at Shasta Ventures, joined the board of directors.
Best known for their hit VR multiplayer shooter Smashbox Arena, which currently boasts a 95% positive rating on Steam, BigBox VR says in a press statement they plan to “refine the VR multiplayer experience” with its upcoming battle royale shooter POPULATION: ONE; the company is couching the game as a budding eSport.
Image courtesy BigBox VR
“We’re excited to team up with partners who believe in accelerating VR online games and esports,” said BigBox VR CEO and co-founder Chia Chin Lee. “It takes boldness to build products and communities that define emerging platforms, and we have the perfect team and investors to bring that vision to life.”
POPULATION: ONE is currently in closed beta, although we had a chance to go hands-on with the debut build at Gamescom this year. While it’s still early in development, it’s clear the team has hit upon some key fundamentals, including a robust locomotion scheme (dubbed ‘FreeMotion’) that lets you fly, climb, run, and quickly build structures to defend yourself in a map with 24 max players.
Maintaining healthy multiplayer is also notoriously difficult in VR currently, but the studio plans to combat this by launching with cross-play compatibility on HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows VR headsets, and things like ongoing events and new content updates.
Fitting in the eSports angle: you’ll be able to spectate in a number of ways, be it growing to the size of Godzilla to watch the game play out in miniature, or following the top player at 1:1 size. The studio says players will be able to wave to each other, high five after a great kill, and use body language in a way that makes social interactions come to life. Post launch, players will contribute user generated content (UGC) available in a live marketplace.
BigBox VR says announcements surrounding competitive events and future partners will drop soon.
Aiming to become a hub for AR and VR development, the government of China’s Jiangxi province says it plans to raise funds totalling $460 million to be invested into AR and VR companies.
Last week the first ever World Conference on VR Industry event was hosted in Nanchang, the capital city of Jiangxi, China, which reportedly attracted 2,000 attendees. The event was sponsored by the province government’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Hoping to attract VR and AR companies, talent, and general interest in the technology to Nanchang, the government announced during the event plans to raise $460 million across several funds for investing in VR and AR.
According to our friends at Yivian, a VR news publication based in China, the capital will be split between a $28.8 million VR/AR industry angel VC fund focused on incubation, a $144 million parent fund, and a $287.9 million industrial investment fund aimed at toward the AR/VR enterprise space.
Some strings are attached—as the funds are ultimately designed to make Nanchang a hub for AR/VR development and talent, the funds will likely require that any investment recipients have some portion of their business based in Nanchang.
After two years in stealth, Spatial today announced an $8 million seed investment to build out its AR/VR collaboration platform.
Spatial is building an immersive workspace that allows multiple users to connect through AR and VR headsets, as well as support for non-immersive users connected by PC or phone. The app aims to turn any room into a collaborative, multi-user space with tools aimed at helping people work together even if they’re remote.
The app represents remote immersive users as avatars (which can be made to look like the user in question with quick face scan), and appears to allow non-immersive users to appear in the room through their webcam as a floating window—a neat way to bring different input modalities and devices together.
Spatial uses the metaphor of a ‘room’ to represent discrete workspaces; users can create multiple rooms, and anything that happens inside of each room is persistent from one session to the next. The company says that documents, photos, and 3D models can be pulled into the space to be shared, and users with a computer in front of them can place livestreamed windows into rooms as well.
The company says that their $8 million seed investment, announced today, includes investors iNovia Capital, Garrett Camp with Expa, Samsung Next, Joi Ito, Mark Pincus and Andy Hertzfeld.
Spatial was co-founded by Anand Agarawala (CEO) and Jinha Lee (CPO). Both appear to have a rich history in 3D user interface design, with Agarawala behind the 3D desktop project BumpTop (acquired by Google), and Lee behind SpaceTop, a natural 3D interface prototype for desktop computing.
Finland-based headset maker Varjo has announced it has raised a $31 million Series B investment to continue the development of its novel ‘Bionic Display’ headset which incorporates a high-density display with a wide field of view display as a shortcut toward a ‘retina resolution’ VR headset.
Varjo’s Series B investment was lead by London-based investment firm Atomico, with participation from Next47, EQT Ventures, and Lifeline Ventures. The company says the money will be used to scale the company’s workforce from 80 to 200 people over the next year, and to fund the launch of the first Varjo headset which is due out in “late Q4.” The company says the Series B round brings their total investment capital to $46 million.
With an expected price between $5,000 and $10,000 per device, Varjo is exclusively targeting enterprise customers with its initial headset. The company says they’re working with Airbus, Audi, Lilium, Saab, Sellen, Volkswagen and Volvo Cars to adapt the headset to enterprise needs, with many companies seeking cheaper and more efficient virtual design and production processes aided by VR equipment.
“Decisions are the daily challenge in a product development process. Supporting virtual development means to deliver the highest available quality to enable reliable decisions. Varjo’s technology is convincing and will help us to close the existing gaps and speed up our development cycles using the advantages of a continuous virtual process,” said Jan Pflueger from the Coordination Augmented and Virtual Reality Center Of Competence at Audi in the press announcement of Varjo’s Series B investment.
Varjo has impressed us with its ‘Bionic Display’ headset, which aims to deliver a VR headset with retina resolution—resolution high enough that individual pixels aren’t discernable by the human eye. The company’s approach involves using a large low-density display in conjunction with a small high-density display, offering a view with a central region of retina resolution fidelity without sacrificing the immersion that comes from a wide field of view.
STRIVR, the immersive VR training company, announced a $16 million round of financing led by GreatPoint Ventures (GPV) that is said to advance the company’s further expansion into the enterprise market. With this investment, GPV Managing Partner Ray Lane also joined the company’s Board of Directors.
Co-founded by former Stanford Cardinal kicker Derek Belch and Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human interaction Lab, STRIVR first catered to professional and collegiate sports teams, creating immersive training programs to improve athletes’ skills across the NHL, NBA, and NFL.
The latest finance round follows a $5 million seed round struck back in 2016, bringing the company’s total funding to $21 to date.
More recently, the company is known for their work in creating VR training programs for Walmart, which will see a roll-out of over 17,000 Oculus Go headsets coming to US-based Walmart stores.
“In a world rapidly shifting to asset performance and predictive analytics, human capital has been largely ignored with outdated training and development tools,” said Ray Lane, a GPV Managing Partner and now member on STRIVR’s Board of Directors. “STRIVR offers companies like Walmart real-world, immersive experiences utilizing VR to place employees into their actual work environments to be trained, affecting their ability to drive both workforce development and retention.”
The list of enterprise customers includes JetBlue, Fidelity, Tyson Foods and United Rentals. Tyson Foods’ safety/hazard awareness pilot training program, the company has reported more than a 20% reduction in injuries and illnesses compared to the year prior, with 89% of learners saying they felt more prepared after VR training.
To support its expansion, the company has recently opened offices in New York, Seattle, and Nashville, in addition to its existing offices in Los Angeles and Menlo Park.
CCP Games, an Icelandic game studio known for the long running EVE: Online MMO and their eager jump into and eventual backpedaling in the VR space, has been acquired by Korea-based developer Pearl Abyss, the studio behind the MMO Black Desert Online. The surprise acquisition, which cost Pearl Abyss $425 million, according to VentureBeat, combines two prominent MMO developers from two different sides of the globe.
While CCP Games was a pioneer in the VR space, having leapt into the medium with Gunjack (2015), Gunjack 2 (2016), EVE: Valkyrie (2016), and Sparc (2017), the storied studio is best known for EVE: Online, a non-VR sci-fi MMO that the company has been operating for more than 15 years.
Having such experience building the complex virtual world of EVE: Online, it made sense for CCP feel right at home building for the burgeoning VR medium. The company had jumped into VR feet first, beginning development on several large titles well before consumer VR headsets had begun shipping in earnest. In 2015, the company raised $30 million to support their VR development.
Players trying an early version of ‘EVE: Valkyrie’ back on the Rift DK1 headset
Unfortunately the company’s bullishness ultimately didn’t pan out; with VR seeing a much slower initial uptick than many had hoped, the studio wasn’t able to sustain a healthy playerbase in its multiplayer-focused VR titles. In 2017 CCP announced they’d have to step back from VR development—closing one office dedicated to VR and selling another—even while saying they continued to have faith in VR’s long term success. Despite the shuttered offices, EVE: Valkyrie and Sparc remain functional today.
The acquisition by Pearl Abyss joins two major MMO studios from very different parts of the world. The studio’s Black Desert Online, a third-person fantasy MMO, has grown in popularity since its 2014 launch; the company says the game has 10 million registered users.
Image courtesy Pearl Abyss
Pearl Abyss went public on the Korean stock market in 2017, now with a $2.6 billion market cap, and since that time says it has “worked to secure competitive global IPs, such as EVE: Online, through strategic investments and M&A activity.”
“We are thrilled to have CCP Games join our team as Black Desert Online continues to branch out globally. CCP is a seasoned publisher with over 15 years of digital distribution experience and know-how,” said Pearl Abyss CEO Robin Jung as part of the announcement. “They have done an incredible job of engaging and maintaining their playerbase, which we aim to learn from and hope to integrate natively into Pearl Abyss’ general practices across all our games. I am confident CCP’s reputable IP and expertise in global publishing will help reaffirm our company’s dedication to developing and servicing the world’s best MMORPGs.”
“I have been seriously impressed with what Pearl Abyss has achieved ever since I first visited their website for Black Desert Online and subsequently became an avid player of the game,” said CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson. “Pearl Abyss is a fast-growing company with lots to offer in terms of technology, capability and vision. I believe our two companies have a lot to learn from each other. We are very excited to join forces with them and achieve great new heights for our companies, our games and – above all – our players.
Considering the lengthy 21 year history of CCP Games, the acquisition comes as quite a surprise. It isn’t entirely clear if CCP Games was in need of a buyer after its big 2015 bet on VR content didn’t pan out, or if Pearl Abyss simply saw a strategic opportunity and was able to make an offer that CCP couldn’t refuse.
According to Pearl Abyss, CCP Games will “continue to operate independently as a developer with studios in Reykjavik, London and Shanghai, while integrating the company’s extensive development and publishing expertise into Pearl Abyss’ operations for all current and future projects.”
Pico Interactive, the Beijing-based standalone VR headset manufacturer, successfully completed a ¥167.5 million RMB (~$24.7 million) Series A funding round. To accompany the news, Pico also announced their second iteration of their Goblin standalone headset, dubbed G2.
As reported by YiVian, Pico Interactive’s financing was co-led by GF Qianhe and GF Xinde Investment, with additional participation from Jufeng S&T Venture Investment and others.
“Pico will keep focusing on all-in-one VR and will also increase its investment in 3D sensing (TOF) and AR technologies in the near future,” Pico CEO Henry Zhou said. “In the future, Pico hopes to become a portal-level AI vision company through the layout of VR+AR+TOF technology and products.”
Pico’s first standalone headset, the Neo DK, was first launched in 2016 based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 platform. The company later introduced the Snapdragon 802-based Pico Goblin last summer, which included a 3DOF controller. Near the end of 2017, the company then launched Pico Neo with both 6DOF head tracking and 6DOF controllers, accomplished by ultrasonics.
Working with HTC, the Pico provides app store access to both its own Pico Store as well as HTC’s multiplatform Vive Wave-based Viveport mobile store.
Now the company has announced the latest iteration of its Goblin headset, which includes a higher resolution display and reduced overall weight in comparison to its 2017-era forerunner.
Image courtesy Pico Interactive
According to a company statement, Pico’s G2 headset is a 3DOF headset built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 XR platform with 4+64GB of memory with up to 256GB of micro-SD card expansion. The G2 is also said to feature dual ‘fast response’ LCD screens with a total of 2,880 × 1,600 resolution, a 75Hz refresh rate, and a 101 degree field of view (FOV). The front of the headset includes a monocular RGB camera, allowing for pass-through viewing and hand gesture inputs for menu selections. Like many standalone headsets, G2 will come with a single 3DOF controller.
The headset hasn’t hit Western shores yet, although China-based customers can now order the G2 at ¥2,000 RMB (~$290).
