Owlchemy Labs wants you to reach out and grab VR content with your hands.
The Austin-based VR studio just secured a $5 million Series A led by Qualcomm Ventures with participation in the round also coming from HTC, The VR Fund, Colopl VR Fund and Capital Factory.
Right now the studio, founded in 2010, is best known among those in the VR community for building the game Job Simulator, which was a bundled launch title for HTC Vive pre-orders and will be a launch title for PSVR and Oculus Touch. The kooky faux futuristic game lets players mess around in a digital work space and knock over coffee cups and turn on computers and make copies. It’s actually a lot more fun than it sounds.
“VR has been a deep passion of ours for many years and being at the forefront of designing new virtual worlds is truly a dream for our whole team,” Owlchemy Labs CEO Alex Schwartz said in a statement. “We’ve solved some of the toughest design and development challenges in this new medium, and with this investment we’ll apply these lessons to a portfolio of full games.”
The 16-person team is experimenting aggressively with how users interact with VR, focusing closely on motion-tracked input interactions to draw participants in and keep them entranced.
“Our work in VR has led us to understand that direct interaction with virtual worlds using your real hands will not only define what makes VR great but will shape all content to come,” the company detailed in a blog post.
Owlchemy Labs likely isn’t going to let its newly raised cash go to its head. It’s planning to keep producing wacky content and it already has some cool projects on deck. The company recently received quite a few headlines when it announced that it would be bringing the absurdist TV show Rick and Morty into the VR world.