WemoLab

Darren Criss stirred up some excitement with this little announcement on Twitter today... and there's still time to sign up and get a phone call from the man himself!

HiGoodbye is the brainchild of Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad), and WemoLab is excited to be able to partner with him on the design process.

Virtual Reality has been an elusive dream for entertainment creators for decades. Over the years various tech companies have created and shipped a variety of headsets that failed to live up to the hype, and in the late 90s and early 2000s the focus on virtual reality shifted towards more complicated and gimmicky hardware seen in academia or arcades. Fast forward to 2012: tech startup Oculus VR blasts onto the scene with a relatively inexpensive, responsive, visually compelling device that was, best of all, incredibly easy to develop for. Valve Software has been at the forefront of VR delivering the highest fidelity VR user experiences. And more recently competition has sprung up with Sony announcing it's own headset, Project Morpheus.

With Facebook’s recent $2 billion acquisition of Oculus, we’re about to witness a new era of interactive entertainment. More than that, we see the vision of the Oculus founding team and backers, expressed in the words of Mark Zuckerberg - “VR is the next major computing platform”.

Now, immersion is big within the gaming community, as evidenced by the obsession with next-gen graphics, and Oculus and Sony have taken great pains to perfect the viewer’s level of immersion, or “presence”. The headsets accomplish this with high definition native resolutions (both at 1920 x 1080) and 960 x 1080 resolution per eye. Coupled with an OLED display in the Oculus and LCD in the Morpheus, the headsets aim for a clear, photorealistic image. Both have also addressed latency and refresh rate issues, making sure the headsets track player head movement effectively, and preventing FPS lag, to prevent viewers experiencing pronounced VR "motion sickness". The resulting experience is extraordinarily realistic and profoundly more impactful than video. Say, for instance, the palpable joy this 90-year-old woman experiences with the simple Oculus Tuscany (Italy) demo. This is the tip of the iceberg.

Since day one, WemoLab’s virtual ocean experience theBlu was conceived as a fully immersive experience with high fidelity species and environments created by Academy Award winning artists. We applied immersive design principles including first person viewing, ability to explore move and interact, scene continuity, 3D sound, degree of user agency, etc. The technology we built serves as the underlying platform for any number of open explorative VR worlds.

As a team and a company we are doubling down on this exciting and exploding opportunity. The team is an one of a kind mix with decades of experience in film CGI, motion capture and machine vision, camera rigs, high end console game development, social web, mobile, data science and interactive entertainment. WemoLab is building the VR software layers to become a core provider of technology and essential product features that will unlock VR content potential. And we’re leveraging our technology to create some killer VR experiences for the upcoming Oculus launch.

Free to Play, Valve’s documentary following the stories of three professional gamers in the DOTA 2 scene, premiered on March 18th at GDC and for download on Steam to viewers at home. Esports (electronic sports) is a fast growing phenomenon. Most of the folks here at WemoLab have been following esports since the early days of Quake tournaments; as gamers ourselves, we were excited for Valve’s veteran take on pro gaming.

Increased media exposure of pro gaming has brought in a steadily expanding community, and these players are the lifeblood of esports. In 2011, 3.5 million people tuned in to watch the MLG pro tournament online; in 2012, the number grew to 11.5 million viewers. And in 2013, the League of Legends Season 3 World Championship was viewed by a staggering 32 million people. To put this in perspective, the 2014 Super Bowl logged 111.3 million views, the “largest for a single TV program” in the United States. Esports in its infancy is already generating a third of those viewership numbers, and is only continuing to grow.

When WemoLab was just starting out three years ago, it seemed we had a tough decision ahead of us: San Fran or LA? We chose to have our HQ in Los Angeles due to our main focus being entertainment software. But it was a tough call because of the concentration of engineering talent in Silicon Valley, and the absence of a vibrant tech ecosystem in LA.

Today, the picture is totally transformed. Venice Beach has become a super cool little area that WemoLab is happy to call home. It’s in the heart of what’s now often referred to as Silicon Beach, an area that spans Santa Monica to Venice Beach and Playa Vista. It’s a sweet spot for the tech industry, and not just because of the weather. The close proximity to Hollywood talent, and the laid back yet hyper productive atmosphere continues to attract companies like Snapchat, Hulu and Google, with a rapidly growing network of startups, entrepreneurs, and tech talent.

Our studio on Rose Ave is a short walk from the beach, and an even shorter walk from a ton of our favorite eating places. If you’re ever in the area, places like the Venice Ale House, Venice Beach Wines, Cafe Gratitude, and Flake are always worth checking out!

Take a glance at http://represent.la/# and you’ll see over 800 startups concentrated in Silicon Beach now. We find ourselves in very good company. We feel fortunate to have grown with the city. There’s lots of big things to come, from Venice, and from us personally at 550 Rose Avenue.

Our team and our work is growing!

We recently refreshed our site to share more about our latest partner and client projects, the killer products we're working on, and the services we offer.

Check it out!