Jumping into a flat chipboard hall was not my usual experience of the legendary Glastonbury music festival in the UK. But there I was, doing my best to dance around and test out this crazy new way of putting myself in the so-called metaverse. It turned out to be a legit experience, as Bristol, UK-based startup Condense showed me how my badly dancing body was instantly transported into a full-fledged 3D landscape. What didn’t matter, at least to me, was how they had done it so fast. Not just fast, but literally live.
What Condense has come up with is very interesting. A “volumetric” camera capture and streaming process that the company says can livestream any type of human activity (music, sports, etc.) in a 3D environment, which can be put into a simulation, as a game, mobile application or platform. And it can be created with Unity or Unreal Engine.
Crucially, to consume it, you don’t need a VR headset to watch it, as the video is streamed live, like a three-dimensional “real-world” video. At Glastonbury, I saw him mostly live. The process that I witnessed with my own eyes was basically instantaneous.
Condense has now raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by LocalGlobe, 7% Ventures and Deeptech Labs. Angels also attended, including Tom Blomfield (former founder of Monzo), Grace Ladoja MBE and Ian Hogarth (former founder of Songkick).
The idea of Condense is that fans can attend concerts or sporting events with friends, get closer to the action, while artists can react in real time, shout out, and more. All I know is that this rarely happens in a live-action scenario these days.
“Hundreds of millions of people hang out on immersive 3D platforms like Roblox, Rec Room, Fortnite, Sandbox, Decentraland, and VRChat, attend virtual events, socialize, and get creative. At the same time, gamer demand for live entertainment in these virtual worlds has never been greater. Condense has built the infrastructure to connect the two,” LocalGlobe partner Ziv Reichert said in a statement.
Condense CEO and Co-Founder Nick Fellingham added, “The Video 3.0 infrastructure we’ve built takes the technical complexity out of livestreaming into the metaverse, so people are free to put their creativity. Video 3.0 will change not only the way we experience live events online, but fundamentally how we interact with each other.
To illustrate, here is a live video of Grove, captured by Condense.
Condense will now also launch a Metaverse studio in partnership with Watershed, Bristol’s cultural cinema and creative tech venue.
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