The Story of Arcturus: Building the Infrastructure for Next-Generation Media
The name Arcturus refers to the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere, chosen to represent the company’s forward-looking vision. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, CTO Devin Horsman revealed how this celestial inspiration mirrors their mission to illuminate the future of media technology.
Finding the Right Team in the Crucible
Great companies often start with the right team coming together at the right moment. For Arcturus, this crystallization happened under pressure. “I met my co-founders in a really high pressure situation, an environment were all consulting in,” Devin explains. “And we saw how each other behaved in that sort of crucible and knew that was the right team to build a company with the right combination of empathy, strategy, and execution.”
Identifying the Core Problem
The founding team zeroed in on a critical gap in the emerging spatial computing landscape. “There’s all these new spatial display devices, things like holographic screens, virtual reality headsets, augmented reality headsets, and so on,” Devin notes. “And with these new spatial devices, you can see sort of into and around content.”
However, a fundamental problem existed: “There is no way to capture live action for these devices. Existing technology was way too costly to do this with or far too inflexible.”
Building the Missing Piece
Through their due diligence, the team discovered an interesting market dynamic. As Devin explains, “It was clear that there were interesting folks that were working on the camera capture systems to record this kind of data, and that there were folks working on the display hardware, but nobody was addressing the sort of core pain point of compressing this really large data and transporting that data from the capture solution to the display devices.”
This gap represented more than just a technical challenge. “Nobody was addressing post production. So when you want to edit, combine, or in any way modify this captured data, it was something like having a camera or a digital camera without the JPEG or without Photoshop.”
Market Evolution and Growth
The company’s solution has found traction across multiple sectors. “Right now, that’s in marketing activations, that’s in online retail, like fashion retail primarily, and in the production of film and entertainment,” Devin shares. Their growth metrics tell a compelling story, with a 150% increase in processing volume and 575% increase in end-viewer distribution over the past year.
The Future of Volumetric Video
Looking ahead, Arcturus envisions a world where volumetric video becomes ubiquitous. “The future is going to look like people capturing these holograms or this volumetric video on their cell phone or with wearable headsets like AR glasses or other types of computing or pervasive computing devices you have around your house,” Devin predicts.
This vision extends to how we consume content as well. “We want to be looking at things like broadcasting an entire sports stadium as a hologram. And maybe you watch that on your coffee table where everyone in your family or your family and friends can see… and move their own view around when they want to get a look at one point or another of action.”
By building the foundational infrastructure for this future, Arcturus is positioning itself at the intersection of content creation and consumption, working to make immersive media as accessible and natural as smartphone photography is today.