This month Foundry 45 turns seven!
Our company and the virtual reality space as a whole have changed a great deal since we started Foundry 45 in February of 2015. So, our seventh anniversary seems like a great opportunity to reflect on what’s happened during that time.
The origin of Foundry 45 actually starts all the way back in 2014, with some wow moments that occurred while trying out the Oculus DK1 and Samsung Gear VR headsets. We were amazed by their potential impact. Within months we were putting mobile phones inside of cardboard boxes with a growing team stuffed into a small, former artist’s studio in the Grant Park neighborhood of Atlanta.
Today’s head mounted displays (HMDs) are outrageously powerful in comparison to those cardboard headsets. The new solutions process all the visuals, sounds, and haptics for a VR experience, and they do it all in one piece of hardware. Standalone headsets like the VIVE Focus 3, the Pico Neo 3, and the Meta Quest 2 are leaps beyond what we imagined, and with every year the tech is more powerful and more affordable.
In our first couple of years, we spent a good deal of time creating 360 degree video experiences. In fact, some of our early rigs consisted of three Go Pros sitting in a 3D-printed harness that may or may not have been sometimes held together with duct tape. We quickly upped our game and started capturing moments like this Georgia Tech Touchdown during the opening weekend of Mercedes Benz Stadium.
For the last five years, we’ve been laser-focused on VR training, and now we’re using all sorts of new technological advancements to craft powerful training experiences that are fully immersive, interactive, and customizable. Recently, an interesting part of that journey has been with motion and volumetric capture. For these types of productions, we work on large sound stages that have dozens of cameras, special motion capture suits, and AI-powered facial capture abilities. Harnessing these technologies allows us to build powerful hard and soft skills experiences in ways that weren’t possible seven years ago.
From our infancy as a small team in a Grant Park office to an ongoing enterprise with team members around the world, we’ve had an amazing journey. We’ve created hundreds of VR training experiences and helped tens of thousands of people learn in new and exciting ways.
We appreciate all of you who have been a part of our journey, and we’re excited to see what the next seven years will bring.
The future holds all sorts of new advancements like hyper-lightweight HMDs, artificial intelligence for user intent recognition, and of course…we keep hearing about this new thing called the Metaverse.
Where will it all be seven years from now? Can’t wait to find out!
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