8i Raises USD$13.5M To Chase The Human Side Of Virtual Reality

15th October 2015, By Drew Olanoff, TechCrunch

There I stood, about a foot away from a mother and her newborn baby. The mother was talking to her daughter in a video captured in virtual reality for the child to see one day when she’s older. It was realistic. Almost scarily so. I was able to walk around a “room” and watch the mother speaking from every angle, including behind her.

I’ve never seen that much human detail with a VR getup on my face.

The really trippy part? The company shot followup footage a few weeks later and seeing the child “grow” with my own eyes was nuts.

That is 8i’s speciality and the New Zealand / Los Angeles / San Francisco based firm has announced a $13.5 million Series A round with participation from an interesting mix of investors to make VR more human: RRE Ventures, Founders Fund Science, Horizons Ventures, Samsung Ventures, Dolby Family Ventures, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Sound Ventures, Signia Venture Partners, Inevitable Ventures, Freelands and Advancit Capital, Kevin Wall, Jeremy Stoppelman, John and Andrew Hendricks, End Cue and Kortschak Investments, Rothenberg Ventures and Boost VC.

8i is building a platform so that content creators can make their own 3D renderings and VR experiences available in anything from a dating app to a feature film. The 360-degree stuff is a nut that 8i cracked and it’s no wonder that there is a lot of interest around them. I mean, Samsung Ventures’ and Dolby’s involvement speaks volumes. The company is also opening a studio in Los Angeles that they plan on letting content creators use for free. The more creativity that flows around the technology, the better it can get.

“We’re focusing on a really hard problem, to bring humans into augmented realities,” 8i CEO Linc Gasking told me.

To focus on the humanity aspect was important for Gasking and his team of 27 (and growing), who come from companies like Pixar, DreamWorks, YouTube, Industrial Light & Magic, PayPal, Microsoft Research, Sony Computer Entertainment, Digital Domain, NVIDIA, Weta Digital and Valve.

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