A Chat with Nick Fellingham, CEO at Deep Tech Start-Up: Condense Reality

Until now, music events by artists like Lil Nas X, Lizzo and Travis Scott in the metaverse have been big-budget productions requiring months of prep and somewhat uncanny avatars of the performer.

They’ve pulled in millions of gamers on platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, but these platforms know audiences are always hungry for new, more immersive experiences. Ones where the connection between the audience is truly live – and more real.

Here at Condense, we’ve built a brand new infrastructure that enables creators to stream real-world 3D events live into virtual spaces and games. We’ve built the tools so creators don’t have to be technical experts or have huge creative budgets to stream live 3D events into the metaverse.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
I grew up interested in tech, music, gaming and business – basically the raw ingredients of Condense! I studied physics, programming and management as my degree because I wanted to build things that matter. Then after uni, I joined a startup working with some incredible people – that was acquired by Twitter in 2014.

After a short stint working at Twitter, I worked at a number of Bristol-based startups, on product development and product management before setting up my own consultancy specialising in machine learning and high-performance data-driven applications.

As a gamer, I saw a transition was happening. Games were becoming a larger part of the human experience (this is now generally called the metaverse) and as a programmer, I could see how technology could help to bring real-world content into these digital worlds in a completely new way – which is why we founded Condense.
 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
We’re based in Bristol – the home of Banksy and Massive Attack, and now a booming games dev and start-up scene too. It means we have this incredible blend of art, music and technology in the city, which has enabled us to find world-class creative and technical talent right here on our doorstep.

The technology has grown with the team – the live experiences we stream now are a world away from where we started on our journey, and the roadmap we have ahead is going to blow people’s minds.
 

What can we hope to see from Condense in the future?

 
Big things! We’re building a new infrastructure for the metaverse and it’s going to have huge implications for live music, sport and our online experiences in the future.

There’s no doubt the metaverse is going to be massive. The challenge now is to inject some reality into our metaverse experiences, to make them truly accessible and scalable – and most importantly to do all this live. Because live events have always mattered and they will continue to matter in the metaverse too.