"We learned how to be more bullish and a bit less Swiss"

Housed on San Francisco's spectacular waterfront at Pier 17, Dart17 is an idea testing laboratory for creatives to experiment and scale their projects. This opportunity was developed as a collaboration between swissnex San Francisco, Swisscom, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Engagement Migros and the Gebert Ruef Stiftung. Geneva based studio Apelab was among the two first projects to join the program. In this interview, Emilie Joly, the CEO of the startup, shares her ongoing experience and fresh learnings.

How long did Apelab’s Dart17 program last?
Dart17 started at GDC in April 2017 and is still ongoing. It’s a three months’ program spread throughout the year.  

What have you learned and achieved during the program? Can you give our readers one or two examples?
In terms of achievement, we’ve setup numerous partnerships with big companies during the program including Technicolor, Viacom, Oculus, Logitech. We also participated to several US based pitch sessions and met more VC’s than we can count.  

We’ve learned how business work in the Bay Area, an amazing opportunity to take a deep dive into the Silicon Valley ecosystem and make contacts. We were also nicely surprised to see how well the ecosystem was already aware of Apelab and our work and our presence at Dart helped us reinforce our brand and product. We also opened a beta program for our creation tools SpatialStories and have now more than 350 subscribed studios which is amazing!

Americans go fast, very fast. No time to waste, we also learned how to be more bullish and a bit less Swiss. Switzerland has a very good design and engineering quality but showcasing it proudly is not necessarily our strength. Here you need to be aware that what you do has value and show it.  

We also got funding from Facebook for our VR game Break a Leg. Amazing!

What has brought you the proximity of the American entertainment and tech industry? 
The confirmation that what we’re doing has value to the industry. It was important for us to understand how the tech and entertainment industry would react to SpatialStories to judge its potential outside of apelab’s own productions. We got a ton of feedbacks and we’re on the right track to build a content creation tool that will serve the whole AR/VR industry worldwide.  We are now in a phase where we’re building the next phase of our tools towards commercialization and towards what the future of computing will look like.  

How did the Californian mindset influence your work?
We learned to focus more on what matters and take risks, take a lot more risks in our focus as a VR/AR startup. It’s a competitive market because it’s all starting to move quickly. Trends come and go, hype starts and stop. We had a good head start with our experience and we know what we want to do and how. I think the mix between Swiss Quality and Californian Risk taking work well :) Also they understand what we do extremely well. Switzerland’s entertainment industry is growing but it’s still quite slow. Investors and cultural financing groups are still a bit hesitant to support startup in that field because they don’t know it so well. In California, we speak the same language and we have some fans there. That said, the SRG/ RTS have been amazing supporters of apelab in 2017, we already have two co-productions with them on our VR Game Break a Leg and a new ARKIT app coming this year. So, things are moving!

Would you recommend this opportunity to other artists with projects with business potential?
Definitely. You won’t know what your project is worth if you don’t confront it. And you’ll be surprised at the reactions. They can get very excited! (and loose interest very quickly too so don’t forget to keep a cold head).

What are the next steps for Apelab? Were they Dart17 inspired?
Our next step is closing our financial seed round for SpatialStories. Next year we will release the first AR/VR creation tool allowing creatives to build VR/AR content without coding called SpatialStories Studio. We will be implementing a lot of high-level technology into the tool like Machine learning, AI, Voice Recognition, eye and gesture tracking etc. We want designers, brands, teachers, scientists to have easy access to all this amazing technology, to enable the creation of new immersive content. In the meantime, studios, students can subscribe to the Beta of our SpatialStories Unity Plugin allowing them to build VR/AR interactive scenes without Csharp knowledge needed inside the game engine. The Beta is free for a limited time and we are still open for subscriptions.