Jens Christensen is the CEO and co-founder of Jaunt VR, which is a VR startup that has raised over $35 million to develop the toolchain for live-action, 360-degree spherical, 3D video. Jaunt’s technology combines “computational photography, statistical algorithms, massively parallel processing, cutting-edge hardware and virtual reality.
Jens talks about Jaunt VR’s mission to capture the world around you, and to be able to put that within a VR experience. It requires capturing a ton of video data, and they’ve developed a parallel processing data farm process to be able to stitch together a fully spherical video. They’re also developing a method for capturing ambisonic 3D audio.
The Jaunt VR Twitter account has been posting various photos of covering a wide range of different sporting events, and Jens says that Jaunt is very interested in eventually providing a live broadcasts of immersive content. Their primary focus in the beginning are sports events, music events, as well as experiments with narrative content ranging from a horror story to a story set in World War II. They’ve haven’t released any VR content to the public yet, but are looking forward to releasing some experiences here soon.
Jens said that they’re still working on there is no full positional tracking yet and at the moment it’s just rotationally tracked, but it’s something they’re still looking into. Storytelling within VR is going to require the developing of a new language and syntax, and that in the beginning they prefer to keep the camera steady to minimize motion sickness.
Jaunt VR is also more interested in leveraging the existing video post-production toolchain for editing, compositing and color correction. It sounds like they’re likely working on some plug-ins or video players to be able to directly integrate and preview VR content while you’re editing it, but Jens didn’t provide any specifics and said that it’s still an open problem. Finally, he sees that VR is going to change a lot of industries ranging from news, music and travel and he’s looking forward to helping play a small part with the work that Jaunt VR is doing.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
