It is with excitement that we announce a fresh direction and new brand for Penrose.
Now and again, it is healthy for a company to evaluate the course of its journey, and recently, our team completed our annual offsite. We came away with enduring memories as well as a renewed and clarified sense of our purpose and principles.
We are therefore pleased to present our new logo and brand identity.
Today, I’m excited to share that Penrose Studios is announcing its $10 million Series A.
At Penrose, we believe in taking an integrated approach to building our company. This means building interdependent architectures across our creative, technical and business initiatives and teams. This is important enough for us that we have enshrined this in one of our core values, cross-pollination. Our artists and engineers work side-by-side to deeply influence each other’s work.
Since we first introduced our second VR movie, Allumette, earlier this year, we’ve been overwhelmed with the love, support and celebration we’ve received from the VR and film communities. When Allumette premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, we were honored and humbled to bring VR further into the film industry and show a new way to tell stories that everyone in the world can appreciate.
Now, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve released Allumette to the world on Oculus Rift, Sony PlayStation VR, Steam VR and HTC’s Viveport.
Since returning to San Francisco after an incredible experience at the Sundance Film Festival, momentum in the VR and AR industry has been palpable. We are truly on the doorstep of a new Renaissance.
At Penrose, we’ve enjoyed recognition and praise from influencers in the film space for our first piece, The Rose and I, as well as our next piece that will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, Allumette. We strive to be authentic in our approach to VR storytelling, and remain dedicated to our hand-crafted creation of virtual worlds.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re releasing our mobile-focused VR app called ROSE in conjunction with the upcoming consumer launch of the Samsung Gear VR powered by Oculus.
ROSE is a burgeoning world of pure imagination that allows the viewer to experience an immersive, cinematic universe in VR. ROSE is a real-time, cinematic story platform built specifically for mobile VR. We're collaborating with Oculus and Samsung to make this ready for the consumer launch of Gear VR.
The ROSE app will initially feature a mobile adaptation of Penrose’s cinematic virtual reality content. The first VR film available on the ROSE app will be a Gear VR Teaser adaptation of “The Rose And I”, a PC-based VR film with positional tracking that we premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this year.
We had an interesting journey creating the Gear VR version of “The Rose And I” from a PC-based VR platform. From the beginning, we knew it wouldn’t be simple, especially because the graphics unit of the PC has 150x the processing power of the Samsung Galaxy S6.
Initially, our instinct was to record a 360-degree video output from our original PC VR experience. But after we created and tested this recording, we realized the limitations of this approach: lower resolution, lower quality 3D, and lower immersion because the viewer is unable to move around in the world of their volition. We therefore began the more difficult but exciting exploration of porting our PC VR experience over to mobile VR with Unreal Engine 4, a real time engine.
In the creation of VR cinematic experiences, we use many tools from both the film and video game worlds. One of the highlights and backbones of our process is the Unreal Engine by Epic Games. We initially created the PC VR-based “The Rose And I” on Unreal Engine, and this greatly simplified our process porting to mobile VR. The new updates that Epic is making to both the Android and Gear VR integration are cutting edge, and thanks to this, we were able to deliver a beautiful experience at a fraction of the effort (not to mention teraflops).
We hope you enjoy ROSE, and we look forward to exploring the new art form of VR storytelling in the many months and years to come.
BuzzFeed's Review of Our VR Film: "The Beautiful “The Rose And I” May Be The Best Argument For Virtual Reality"
Today, Penrose is announcing the Limited Release Developer's Cut of "The Rose And I", a VR short film that we Premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival 2015. To receive the download link, please follow @PenroseVR on Twitter and Tweet The #RoseAndI. We will DM you a private download link by next week. This will only be available for a limited time.
