Jaunt VR

» see jauntvr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i missed jaunt. it was a hollywood-adjacent vr company at a time when i was reading about turkish tech policy and reading more openrl than uploadvr. cinematic vr was a thing american techcrunch covered as if it were on the verge of a netflix moment between '14 and '17, and i kept seeing the same five demos cited in the same five articles. jaunt was the company behind several of those demos.

arthur van hoff cofounded jaunt in september 2013 in palo alto. van hoff was an early sun microsystems engineer, one of the original java team, and later a founder at flipboard. jaunt came out of stealth in 2014 with a thesis that there was a market for high-end cinematic vr content. the studio would make the content and would also build the camera rig studios needed to shoot it. that combination of camera plus content plus distribution app was the pitch.

the funding followed quickly. disney, sky, axel springer, evolution media, peter gabriel, and several other investors put in over a hundred million dollars across multiple rounds. the 2015 series c alone was sixty-five million. by '16 jaunt had its own twenty-four lens camera, the jaunt one, plus a cloud rendering pipeline, plus an app on the oculus store. paul mccartney sang inside a jaunt 360 video. the studio looked like it had everything in place.

in fairness, the audience never showed up. cinematic vr did not become the next television in any of the years that followed. by october 2018 jaunt was laying off most of the staff and pivoting to volumetric video for ar. that pivot did not save the company either. in september 2019 verizon bought the patents and software, the jauntvr.com domain went dark, the company shut down for good. roughly six years from incorporation to the verizon asset sale.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

anyway, jaunt was at the front of a wave of cinematic vr startups that came out of the post-facebook-oculus-acquisition moment in 2014. the bet was straightforward. facebook had just paid two billion for oculus, the rift was coming, and somebody would need to make the content. jaunt positioned itself as that somebody for the documentary and music tier, while the games industry handled the gaming tier separately.

the camera was the most visible part. jaunt one had twenty-four lenses arranged in a sphere, plus a custom cloud stitching pipeline that turned the raw footage into a stitched stereoscopic 360 file. the rig was rented to production crews around the world, mostly for documentary and concert work. paul mccartney's pure mccartney vr experience was the high profile release. nbc shot pieces with it. red bull used it for action sports.

the disney money was the other anchor. disney had bought oculus rifts for every imagineer and was running internal vr pilots. jaunt's disney connection meant the company was always one announcement away from being the official disney vr studio. that announcement never came.

~ the slide ~

the unit economics never worked. 360 video was expensive to shoot, expensive to stitch, and the install base for headsets was small enough that no production paid back its budget at retail. by '16 the cinematic vr space was already showing signs of contraction. felix and paul studios kept making things but at a smaller scale, within. vrse rebranded to within and pivoted toward enterprise. jaunt held on longer than most because the disney money cushioned the burn rate.

by '17 the writing was on the wall. headset sales were below internal projections at oculus and at samsung gear vr, the major distribution path for jaunt content. samsung discontinued gear vr support in '20. the app store presence collapsed. jaunt's cinematic vr business was running into a market that was contracting faster than it was building.

in october 2018 the studio announced a significant portion of staff would be laid off and the company was abandoning vr to focus on ar volumetric video. mitzi trumbo had taken over as ceo earlier that year. the pivot did not work. by mid 2019 jaunt was shopping its assets. verizon bought what was left on september 30 2019.

~ what came after ~

verizon was building its 5g use case story in 2019, ar was on the list of things 5g was supposed to enable. the jaunt ip went into that bucket and was rarely mentioned again. as far as anybody can tell, none of the cinematic vr productions jaunt funded shipped after the acquisition.

the larger cinematic vr category that jaunt was trying to anchor never recovered. by 2026 the immersive video field is mostly enterprise training and museum installations. consumer vr exists as a gaming category on quest, the cinematic side is small enough that the new york times closed its vr department in 2019, the wall street journal closed its in '18. jaunt was the highest funded entry in a category that did not have a 100 million dollar audience.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »