Humans don’t see the world straight-on: They see a whole range of things through peripheral vision, and adjust view based on what’s interesting within their range of vision. But video, for the most part, is shot straight-on — meaning that the typical video camera loses most of what we would actually see. Condition One is focused on enabling video producers to capture and share what typical video products miss, with a 180-degree field of vision.
Condition One was founded by war videographer and documentary producer Danfung Dennis, whose film “Hell and Back Again” was nominated for a 2012 Academy Award. He and Chief Product Officer Takaaki Okada decided to build the technology around enabling video producers to display this content.
The solution uses a different video camera lens, which can better approximate human vision. But all the other production work is pretty much the same — producers can use the same software to edit their videos. The main difference is the video player, which decodes the video on devices like the iPhone or iPad, allowing users to swipe through to see outside the direct range of vision. It can also take advantage of the accelerometer in mobile devices to follow the user’s movement.
At TechStars Demo Day, Condition One had announced that it raised $500,000. It’s expanded that seed round to $2.35 million, coming from Mark Cuban, who invested prior to Demo Day, as well as Manilla CEO George Kliavkoff and other angels.
With the additional funding, the team has added a few new employees and opened up a Palo Alto office. It now has a total of ten employees, after hiring engineers with expertise in 3-D graphics, spatial audio, and GPU optimization. With the new team members in place, Condition One is looking to move beyond just on-demand video downloads, and potentially enable live events and higher-resolution video feeds.
In the meantime, the startup is working with video producers to get its technology in use. To that end, Condition One released this demo app, to show off the technology’s capabilities. And it’s also worked with Discovery’s digital media group on the network’s Hidden Worlds: New York iPad app.