MatterVR, a VR content house founded by film industry vets, has announced a distribution deal with Eevo, a streaming platform for curated VR video.
MatterVR may be relatively new to the VR scene, but they bring with them decades of notable film production. Founders Steve Holtzman and Daniel Gregoire met while working together on Cosmos (2014) and have since founded the company to tell stories in virtual reality. Holtzman has worked on film and TV productions for a number of major networks, while Gregoire has had his hands in Evolve (2015) and Star Wars Episode II (2002) & III (2005), among a roster of other notable projects, according to the company.
FIRST, one of the company’s debut pieces of content (commissioned by Zypre and sponsored by AMD) is an impressive recreation of the Wright Brother’s famous first flight at Kitty Hawk, NC. Rendered in real-time, the experience is detailed not only graphically but also historically. After recreating an identical virtual version of the dual-prop glider, MatterVR recreated the entire experience of the first flight, down to the initial flight checks and starting the engine with a hand crank. A good thing too, as the Smithsonian—who is curating the experience—would expect no less.
But real-time experiences (for now) leave only the owners of powerful desktop computers as an audience.
To expand their distribution, MatterVR has signed with VR video streaming platform Eevo, which will host pre-rendered versions of MatterVR content that can be viewed on a wider variety of platforms, like Samsung’s mobile Gear VR headset. First won’t be distributed through EEVO, but “serial VR content” from the company will be.
Unlike YouTube’s open hosting, Eevo is a “highly curated, high quality content” platform. The company is hand-selecting content for their streaming platform and say they also support content creators with tools and funds to tell their stories in VR. The company recently closed a $1 million investment to build out their VR streaming platform.
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Eevo plans to first bring their streaming platform app to Gear VR, with other VR headsets following. The company is further working on analytics tools and a multi-path narrative editor to enable the possibility of branching storylines based on user interaction.