By Adam Wakefield

“Virtual reality is simulating an environment that isn’t actually the environment you are standing in. That can take various forms but for us, it is about exploring the most amazing places in this world,” says Deep VR co-founder Ulrico Grech-Cumbo. “We are talking about underwater environments, we are talking about in caves. We are talking about in the sky. We are talking about faraway places.”

Despite being a content company, Deep VR develops cameras specifically for 360° filming, where everything in a room around the camera is filmed. Following post-production, the 360° footage is then played back, which is where the Oculus VR headset fits in.

“You can experience a room as if you are actually standing there, which is why our tagline is ‘Taking you there’,” Grech-Cumbo says.

Telmo dos Reis, Deep VR’s fellow co-founder, says he and Grech-Cumbo met four years ago when ProCapture, his video media company, began working with Ambrosia Brand Experience Agency, which Grech-Cumbo started. 

At the beginning of 2015, both Dos Reis and Grech-Cumbo were very interested in Oculus being publicly available, though they did not know how to use it yet.

“We were chatting to the Standard Bank team earlier in the year about the Oculus, and they were coming to understand how exactly it works and what it can be used for,” Grech-Cumbo says.

Ambrosia proposed to Standard Bank the filming of their Joy of Jazz Young Artist winner in a jazz club in 360°, and days later, Dos Reis and Grech-Cumbo got the green light to do the filming, with Standard Bank aiming to use the footage at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival.

“I called Telmo in a panic and I said ‘Listen, we‘ve literally got, in the order of hours, to invent technology that kind of doesn’t exist to do this’ and we spent a lot of time researching the principles of how it should work and eventually came together,” Grech-Cumbo explains. “We built a camera rig. We set it up on the day, we pressed record, and prayed, and Telmo spent the next three to four weeks pretty much with his head in the Oculus, and his head in a brand new editing suite that is completely different from the stuff he is used to.”

“Long story short, this campaign was a huge success. We re-grouped afterwards to say, ‘This was really interesting’. We just feel like there is more of a market for 360-based video. Who is doing this? Who are the players?” Grech-Cumbo says.

The pair looked at not only South Africa but also overseas, and found there were very few people in the 360° video market.

“That was a bunch of months ago and we decided we are going to form a new company, Deep VR, which specialises in live action content,” he says. Dos Reis points to how Deep VR is a combination of his skills as a sound and video engineer, and Grech-Cumbo’s experience in the brand-activation sphere, in addition to holding a degree in mechanical engineering.

“We can work on something new that is happening around the world, and we can put our heads together and we can create something,” Dos Reis says.

“We saw there was an opportunity there to pursue this further. We had quite a lot of success with the Standard Bank job and it was really fun and both of us feel like we are learning new stuff and pushing the limit a little bit and our own abilities, so we are enjoying that challenge.”

Grech-Cumbo says Dos Reis and himself put a lot of pressure on themselves to stay at the crest of the 360-VR wave, a challenging task as “there are no rule books and there are no precedents really”.

“In terms of application, we’ve had this chance to get our heads into ‘Where can this actually be useful?’, and that question has kind of turned to ‘Where can this not be useful?’,” he says.

From initially appearing to be a niche product, the uses of 360° VR to Dos Reis and Grech-Cumbo now seem obvious.

From interactive branded content online or at activations, health and safety education, and virtual sight-seeing to real estate, 360° content allows users to live inside the content, compared to the window-pane view they are currently used to.

Far from being left behind, South Africa is at the very crest of this new wave.

For more information, visit www.deepvr.co.za. Alternatively, connect with them on Facebook, YouTube, or on Twitter.