Yet another VR content company springs to life
SAN FRANCISCO - With the virtual reality wave cresting this year, a growing number of content-focused companies are springing up to provide content for the nascent technology.
The latest group to surface goes by the vaguely gamer-ish name of The Rogue Initiative, according to a company release Thursday. The Los Angeles-based company says it is staffed by veterans from an alphabet soup of entertainment and gaming concerns - Activision, DreamWorks, Pixar, Disney, Sony and so on - and has raised an undisclosed amount of seed capital from Bay Area-based Presence Capital and The Virtual Reality Fund.
Rogue Initiative is led by CEO Pete Blumel, who while at Activision was involved in the hit game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Chief production officer Cathy Twigg has worked for nearly two decades in feature films and animation on projects such as Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. And chief business development officer Hrish Lotlikar was previously global evangelist at Toptal, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed platform for freelance software developers.
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"Our vision at The Rogue Initiative is to create a studio where the most successful storytellers and filmmakers from Hollywood collaborate side-by-side to create and develop new worlds and interactive experiences with the best and brightest from the video game and tech industries," Blumel said in a statement.
Veteran filmmaker Lynda Obst, producer on 2014's Interstellar, serves as an advisor to Rogue Initiative. She praised the team's leaders as "wildly creative professionals able to bring even the most fantastic ideas to life.”
The Rogue Initiative reports that it will launch with "a big episodic action tentpole franchise, a psychological thriller, and a stylized animated action adventure" by late 2016, although no more details about such a slate were provided. The company did offer a few still images of its work in progress, which include animations of a male warrior figure and the dramatic image of Sydney Harbor encased in ice.
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Rogue Initiative is jumping into an increasingly competitive space as developers look to create experiences that go beyond gaming for devices such as the existing smartphone-based Samsung Gear VR and coming high-end products such as Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Virtual and augmented reality is anticipated to be a $120 billion business by 2020, according to industry advisors Digi-Capital.
Content production shops such as NextVR and Disney-backed JauntVR have been pushing hard to make sporting events particularly riveting in VR, showcasing demos of that progress at recent Super Bowl events. And smaller companies such as Penrose Studios - started by the former content director at Oculus, Eugene Chung - are trying to create new animation experiences for the medium, which they displayed along with other content providers at the recently concluded Sundance Film Festival.
Follow USA TODAY tech reporter Marco della Cava on Twitter @marcodellacava.