ARCTURUS RAISES $5M TO HELP BRING HOLOGRAPHIC CONTENT TO GAMING

Volumetric video specialist, Arcturus, has secured $5M funding in a seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures. 

The round also attracted participation from leaders in the sports, telecom, gaming, and music space, including HBSE Ventures; NTT Docomo Ventures; Build Ventures; Co-Founder, Co-Chairman, and former Co-CEO of Riot Games, Marc Merril; and CEO of Atlantic Records, Craig Kallman. 

Arcturus says it intends to use the new capital to scale its software development team, focus efforts on sales growth, and expand the product line with an emphasis on live streaming features. 

Founded by a management team with years of collective experience at major companies including at Netflix, Autodesk, Pixar, Dreamworks, Google, YouTube and Uber, Arcturus is revolutionising the immersive content experience across a range of verticals including e-commerce, music, sports, interactive media, and gaming.

From viewing sports in holographic form, to engaging with interactive digital human assistants, and more immersive forms of social media and e-commerce, volumetric video is enabling the consumption of content in completely new ways. 

With volumetric video, content is captured by an array of cameras and depth sensors that surround a subject to create a photorealistic model. These holograms are fully 3D and interactive, making them a natural fit for any spatial experience such as augmented or virtual reality.

Moritz Baier-Lentz, Partner at BITKRAFT Ventures, explained: “Volumetric technology is exciting for a simple reason: it starts with reality. Think about it: Most of today’s digital media—music, photos, or film—begin with capturing the real world. Thanks to Arcturus’ extraordinary technology, a future where you record yourself, your friends, or your environment with a LIDAR-enabled smartphone, and transport them into the next interactive and 3-dimensional social media post, product showcase, or video game is closer than ever.”

Arcturus’ flagship product is HoloSuite, a SaaS platform for editing and distributing volumetric video, which consists of HoloEdit and HoloStream. The HoloSuite platform enables users to author, edit, and stream volumetrically captured performers and environments and can be interacted with on any desktop browser and smart mobile devices.

HoloEdit is an optimized pipeline for the editing and processing of volumetric video and HoloStream is an adaptive streaming solution extending the same technology utilized by the streaming giants, Netflix and Amazon Video, to stream volumetric video directly to the viewer. HoloEdit enables content creators and game studios to easily edit and compress clips, then distribute them to third-party tools, including real-time game engines like Unity, Unreal, and more.

Looking ahead, Arcturus CEO, Kamal Mistry, said: “Arcturus’ mission is to create a future where digital human holograms are captured from reality, customized and even interact with the viewer in real time. This can take the form of digital customer service agents, human avatars, virtual 3D concerts and fashion runways, or giving access to the perspectives of professional athletes in broadcast sports. With the backing of BITKRAFT Ventures, true leaders in games and XR investments, we are confident Arcturus will serve as a catalyst to enable widespread accessibility to volumetric video creation, enabling millions of users to create a new form of interactive content.”

Arcturus worked with Docomo for the Docomo Open House in 2021, specifically featuring HoloSuite, including HoloStream, the adaptive bitrate streaming solution for volumetric video. Arcturus has supported numerous brand and celebrity activations including Verizon’s fan experience at Super Bowl LIV and Samsung’s 2020 phone release featuring popular Korean boy band BTS. 

Discover more about Arcturus here.

AYO.NEWS says:

The rapid advancement of volumetric video technology, thanks to trailblazers like Arcturus is opening up whole new vistas of exciting possibilities across the digital space – and its potential impact in the gaming industry is hard to overstate. 

Already boasting an incredibly experienced team and having proven its capabilities, we’re sure the backing of BITKRAFT and the other investors will help the Arcturus shift up a gear and dazzle the world. Soon, the clunky, unrealistic 3D models of the past will be a distant memory, and we’ll be so used to fully immersive, lifelike experiences that we’ll wonder how we ever lived without them. Holograms, hell yeah! 

Staying with BITKRAFT Ventures, last month the firm announced a strategic partnership with Delphi Digital, a leading blockchain advisory firm dedicated to advancing the understanding and development of the growing digital asset market.