How An Earthquake Led Me To A VR Startup

Bryn Mooser is the co-founder of Ryot Films, which produces media for immersive formats like virtual reality and 360-degree video. He started thinking about transformative technology while working as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, living on the edge of the Sahel in a region that had cell-phone towers–but had never had landlines. Ryot initially published news stories that enabled readers to take social actions, and then pivoted into immersive video. In 2016, Mooser and his co-founder, David Darg, sold Ryot to AOL

- Jeff Bercovici

As someone who's covered humanitarian crises as a journalist and a filmmaker for years, I’ve always felt that traditional filmmaking and photography were limited. When you walk into a war zone or someplace after a natural disaster with a traditional camera or video recorder, you can capture only one thing. That’s frustrating. There’s nothing like actually standing where you can understand the scale of these things. When I saw VR for the first time a couple of years ago, I thought this could be an incredibly powerful medium to give people a totally new perspective.

We were the first group to show a VR film at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was about solitary confinement. At the after-party, a friend showed me a prototype of the Hero 360 rig, which is just a bunch of GoPros in a 3-D-printed case. That was when the light bulb went off for us. I knew all of our filmmakers around the world could shoot on GoPros and, more important, that they knew how to fix them in the field. I knew we could figure out the stitching part with our postproduction team.