Leadership Team Including Veterans of Adobe, Apple, ILM, Red Giant Looks to Develop Industry-Standard VR Platform
Former ILM CTO Scott Squires, ex-Adobe and Apple engineer Bill Hensler, and Red Giant co-founder Sean Safreed are behind the scenes at Pixvana, a Seattle-based virtual reality (VR) start-up. The company is working on a cloud-based VR platform that it says will improve the user experience for VR and augmented-reality applications "across a broad set of viewing devices."
Funded with a $6 million investment led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Vulcan Capital, Pixvana launched today under the leadership of CEO Forest Key, a veteran of Microsoft, Macromedia, Pinnacle Systems and ILM. Hensler, who oversaw engineering and R&D for Adobe's video software products before moving over to the Photos group at Apple, is chief product officer, Squires is CTO and creative director, and Safreed is VP of product management. (Key and Hensler are pictured above outside Pixvana's office.)
"It is clear that just as in the early days of web video, which was hard for consumers to configure on their devices and often stuttery and unsatisfying to watch, VR video is facing similar challenges," Key said in a prepared statement. Madrona Venture Group Tim Porter said the company hopes to "create the industry standard platform for VR video."
Developer and engineer types, take note — the company is now hiring.
