Why Soar?

Without Soar’s advances in the volumetric space, we won’t have the next generation of immersive content. We won’t have the valuable, engaging creativity that will propel many industries forward. Building a volumetric world requires being able to create volumetric content in real time, and Soar is, dare we say, the one system that makes it possible.

It’s a bold claim but we stand by it. There is a very clear future that the whole tech industry has been preparing for over the past decade - and to that extent, many other industries. This future is where we meld the real world and the virtual world. A future where you can live in this virtual landscape, either isolated from the real world (VR) or built right on top (AR). But how can we ever get to this new place if people don’t have access to the tools they need to create it? Spoiler: Soar is the tool that finally makes it possible to create the volumetric future.

There’s a reason (or multiple reasons) why volumetric has not been able to penetrate the everyday content creators’ lexicon. Something seems very wrong about a system that requires hours of preparation, hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, a team of producers, and a render farm to produce a measly one minute volumetric video. In an age where creators and users are accustomed to things “just working,” volumetric has been the antithesis of this concept. In response to this, Soar’s founders set out to enable the creation of volumetric video to be as simple as standard 2D video.

Soar believes that in order to bring truly valuable and intimate 3D experiences to users, there are a few necessities that must be accomplished: accessibility, portability, and scalability. The world has seen an astronomical increase in content creators as social media has continued to scale into the primary way people create and consume content. Creators don’t want to (or can’t!) spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on hardware, especially when that investment will not return hundreds of thousands of dollars. Creators also want to create content in an efficient manner that doesn’t require a huge team of people and hours, if not days, of rendering content. Up until now, volumetric video has been the product of massive investment with little to no return.

We designed Soar to actually work. Soar’s Capture Suite has the same ease of use as traditional 2D video production, while empowering creators to utilize every camera angle possible. No more waiting 1+ hours for calibration, only to find out that you have to re-calibrate all of your cameras in a painstaking manner. Place your calibration cube in the middle, click the calibrate button, and wait one minute. Then, you can see your content in real-time. Don’t like the calibration? Do it again. And again. And again. We’ve spent many dev hours trying to perfect the parts of the pipeline to be super fast and super efficient, so your creative process is free to take whatever shape you like, without any slow downs from the technology.

Need your content right as soon as you click stop recording? No problem. You can simultaneously save raw and compressed content that is ready for use right after your latest take. You can import that raw content right away to step through frames, adjust quality settings, adjust your bounding box, etc. and then export to an extremely small file size for immediate use. Need an OBJ sequence? Yep, you can do that immediately as well. Do you want to see how your content will look in your app in real-time without having to capture and import into your application? Just stream it to your app to see and hear exactly what your users will experience when you decide to go live to all of your adoring fans. You’re in the moment when creating content, so why not have the ability to share that moment in real-time with everyone?

The ooey-gooey center to this volumetric brownie is the compression. The way Soar handles data is unparalleled. Without this part, the whole pyramid of accessibility, portability, and scalability crumbles. The reason why there haven’t been any engaging use cases is because everyone is stuck making short-form tik-tok dance videos with this groundbreaking technology. In order to create valuable content, we need to have long-form content that relies on sending a message, and in order to make long-form content, the tools need to be accessible and functional on a much wider scale.

Without Soar’s advances in the volumetric space, we won’t have the next generation of immersive content. We won’t have the valuable, engaging creativity that will propel many industries forward. Building a volumetric world requires being able to create volumetric content in real time, and Soar is, dare we say, the one system that makes it possible. If we were meant to experience the world in 2D… we would be experiencing the world in 2D. But we don’t have to. Soar has been working for a long time to crack open the door to the kind of real 3D expression that the future will be made of — come join us at the party on the other side.