In the evolving landscape of Extended Reality (XR), London-based V-Nova has redefined the boundaries of mass entertainment.
With a newly established office in Los Angeles, the global technology company is forging partnerships with Hollywood studios to promote its groundbreaking XR format, V-Nova PresenZ, which taps into the multi-billion-dollar global market of XR users, delivering a revolutionary Six Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) experience that retains full three-dimensional information for the whole scene, allowing to change the point of view and even look behind objects like in real life.
“Our innovative and revolutionary format allows viewers to navigate through multi-dimensional virtual environments, immersing themselves in photorealistic scenes that rival the cinematic quality of Hollywood films,” says co-founder Guido Meardi.
Meardi’s fascination with advanced technology began at the age of eight, when he was coding; by the age of nine, he was a subscriber to Scientific American, which led him to self-teach speed-reading and memory techniques, enabling him to absorb vast information from books on astrophysics, genetics and artificial intelligence.
His academic pursuits paved the way for his education at the University of Texas at Austin and later at MIT, where he received the Siebel Scholarship, awarded to the nation’s most talented students.
When he co-founded V-Nova, Meardi channeled his revolutionary work in data compression, having recognized that traditional encoding methods were becoming bottlenecks in a data-driven world.
In response, he developed the MPEG-5 Part 2 LCEVC (Low-Complexity Enhancement Video Coding), which improves data compression by 40% and reduced transcoding costs by 70%.
“Prominent technology firms and senior production executives are recognizing us as a game-changing advancement — a feat once deemed impossible with contemporary technology,” Meardi says.
It was widely believed that creating XR content that harmonizes multidimensional photorealism with the quality of theatrical features would necessitate managing over a Terebit per second of data in real time.
V-Nova has made it feasible to run this level of XR on on standard devices, opening the possibility to deliver these experiences to all XR headsets. Meardi’s pioneering research in data compression and the development of a breakthrough code has garnered attention from major private capital and technology investors, leading to an initial funding raise of $140 million.
Meardi has over 500 patents, contributing to a corporate portfolio of more than 1,200 international patents on data compression for video, imaging, and point-cloud data.
The company’s technological advancements facilitate the delivery of images, video, and volumetric data with enhanced quality, reduced costs, and lower energy consumption, positioning V-Nova as a leading advocate for sustainability and decarbonization in the digital sector.
Savvy startups know they need to surround themselves with top experts in their field and help Meardi further his vision to recruit recognized technology innovators including Rick Clucas, the renowned designer of the first-ever commercial parallel processing unit and lead investors like Federico Faggin, the legendary inventor of the silicon-gate transistor, the first commercial microprocessor and the capacitive touch interface.
“Innovation is a collective journey, requiring inspired teams working cooperatively to push the boundaries of what’s possible,” Meardi says.
Approximately 40% of V-Nova’s employees are authors of at least one patent, underscoring the company’s deep-rooted culture of innovation.
The V-Nova PresenZ tech has created a mass market for XR, delivering wide appeal feature-length content to non-gamers. For the entertainment industry, V-Nova PresenZ carries a production cost like those associated with the production of any typical Computer Graphics (CG).
V-Nova’s London studio can cost-effectively remaster existing animated content or CG-rich movies, providing IP owners with the ability to repurpose their archive material for new monetization opportunities.
To demonstrate the power of V-Nova PresenZ to the music industry, V-Nova Studios worked with Grammy, Emmy and Golden Globe Award winning songwriter Diane Warren to produce a PresenZ 6 Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) immersive experience with her newest song, “Weightless.”
Performed by international singer Arilena Ara, the V-Nova PresenZ presentation of “Weightless” allows viewers to move in multiple directions around each scene, “making them feel as though they are part of the song itself,” Meardi says.
The V-Nova PresenZ format showcases lifelike close-ups of the singer and a music-video-style editing approach that immerses the audience in a magical choreography.
“Diane Warren is a major force in music, and her latest song “Weightless” is perfect for the V-Nova PresenZ experience and underscores the tremendous potential for combining music with our cutting-edge immersive technology,” Meardi says.
V-Nova is working with 50+ companies across various industry sectors to integrate its technologies into solutions for TV, media, entertainment, social networks, e-commerce, ad-tech, security, aerospace, defense, automotive and gaming.
Those companies include tech giants such as NVIDIA, Meta, Comcast (which is a minority V-Nova shareholder) including Comcast divisions NBCUniversal and Dreamworks, Globo-TV, Brazil, the security and defense contractor Leonardo, and leading television manufacturer Hisense.
By collaborating with industry leaders, V-Nova’s technologies are being incorporated into mainstream applications, enhancing digital experiences for a global audience. These partnerships have enabled the company to extend its reach and impact, solidifying its position as a key innovator in the tech industry.
“What is perhaps most exciting of all about V-Nova PresenZ is – it just works,” Meardi concludes. ”Consumers will be able to experience the technology’s multi-dimensional, immersive format as soon as they affix the goggles onto their XR headgear and switch on the content. Because of the format’s singular data compression, motion sickness is eliminated, and users will simply be able to enjoy being transported into a hyper-realistic story, happening all around them.”
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