Eugene Chung

Eugene Chung (credited at film festivals as Eugene YK Chung) is a filmmaker and entrepreneur who founded Penrose Studios, a San Francisco studio that makes animated virtual reality films, and is its chief executive. Before Penrose he was head of film and media at Oculus VR, where he built the team that became Oculus Story Studio and was executive producer of its first VR short, Lost.

Penrose released the animated VR works The Rose and I (2015), Allumette (2016) and Arden's Wake (2017), the last two directed by Chung. An expanded cut, Arden's Wake (Expanded), won the Best VR award at the 74th Venice International Film Festival in 2017, the first year the festival held a competition for virtual reality works.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Checked every claim against the cited UploadVR, TechCrunch, Fortune, Korea JoongAng Daily, Tribeca, La Biennale, Steam, AV Network, Cartoon Brew, WEF and archived Penrose pages. About review dates.

Early life and education

Chung grew up in Virginia. A 2016 TechCrunch profile reported that his mother was an accountant and his father an opera singer. He earned a BSc from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar.

Career

Finance and Pixar

His World Economic Forum biography lists earlier work as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, a private equity investor at Warburg Pincus and a member of the production staff at Pixar Animation Studios. Penrose's own company biography gives the same two finance roles.

Oculus

According to a 2015 UploadVR profile, Chung tried and failed to persuade the venture capital firm he then worked for to invest in Oculus. He then contacted Oculus chief executive Brendan Iribe, who invited him to try the company's demo in Valve's VR room. Iribe offered him a job afterwards, and Chung became head of film and media at Oculus, where he assembled the team that became Oculus Story Studio. Both the World Economic Forum and Penrose describe him as a co-founder of Story Studio. TechCrunch described him as the first head of Oculus Studios, the cinematic content production arm of Oculus.

Oculus presented Story Studio at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015 with Lost, an animated short directed by former Pixar artist Saschka Unseld in which a mechanical creature appears to the viewer in a forest. Fortune later identified Chung as the film's executive producer. Facebook had bought Oculus for about US$2 billion in 2014. UploadVR reported that Chung left about a year after the acquisition to start his own company.

Penrose Studios

Chung founded Penrose Studios in San Francisco in 2015. He described it to UploadVR as "an independent place where creatives, hackers and storytellers can come together and create a completely new medium."

The studio's first piece, The Rose and I, is a tribute to The Little Prince in which the viewer stands beside a small moon where the story takes place. Penrose released a limited "developer's cut" in late May 2015. For the footstep sounds the team tapped a clay pot, which Chung explained as using "real sounds to try and be naturalistic and humanize this technology." The film screened at the Sundance and Tribeca festivals, and a Samsung Gear VR version titled ROSE was released in the Oculus Store.

In March 2016 Penrose announced an US$8.5 million seed round led by Accelerate-IT Ventures, with TransLink Capital, 8 Angel, Suffolk Equity and individual angels taking part. UploadVR described it as the largest seed round then announced for a VR content startup, and TechCrunch called it the biggest seed round in VR. NextVR executive chairman Brad Allen and director Roman Coppola joined as strategic advisors. Chung said at the time that the studio's next pieces were "being made more and more by our own proprietary in-house VR creation tools."

Allumette, loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl", follows an orphan girl in a city floating in the clouds. Tribeca credits Chung as director. Penrose released a preview at Sundance, showed an abridged 10-minute version at a PlayStation VR event during GDC, and premiered the full version, which runs over 20 minutes, at the Tribeca Film Festival on 14 April 2016. Chung called it "the longest experience of its type and category in virtual reality." The studio built it with Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4, and in the PlayStation VR version the viewer controls a magic matchstick with the PlayStation Move controller. The Steam release from Penrose is dated 13 October 2016.

Arden's Wake had its world premiere in the Virtual Arcade of the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. Tribeca's listing names Chung as director, Chung and Jimmy Maidens as project creators, and Maidens as VFX supervisor. Tribeca lists it at 15 minutes and describes a young woman who, after sea levels have risen, lives with her father in a lighthouse and descends into the water when he goes missing. The 16-minute Arden's Wake (Expanded) was one of 22 works in the first Venice Virtual Reality competition in 2017. A jury chaired by John Landis gave it the Best VR award on 9 September 2017; the other two prizes went to La Camera Insabbiata and Bloodless. Allumette and Arden's Wake: The Prologue were later shown in the VR theater of the 22nd Busan International Film Festival.

An expansion, Arden's Wake: Tide's Fall, with Chung and Maidens as project creators, was announced as a world premiere for the 2018 Tribeca Immersive Virtual Arcade, with Alicia Vikander voicing the lead character, Meena.

Penrose's own VR and AR creation tool, Maestro, won the VR and AR category of the 2018 SXSW Interactive Innovation Awards under the entry title "Maestro: Empowering VR Storytelling Through Social Collaboration". In July 2018 the studio closed a US$10 million Series A round led by TransLink Capital. New investors included Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, will.i.am, Korea Telecom and Co-Made, and Sway Ventures, 8VC and Suffolk Equity returned. TechCrunch reported that Penrose had four projects in development, the next of which was being built with standalone headsets in mind, and that the studio was starting to look at phone-based augmented reality built on ARKit and ARCore. Chung told Cartoon Brew that "increasingly, our team is hiring from the video game world."

As of March 2026, the Penrose website listed Chung as chief executive and founder.

Views on VR

In a 2017 interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily, Chung described virtual reality as a new art form still in its early stages. The newspaper reported that he sees VR creating empathy by letting viewers feel fully immersed, and he said the experience "cannot be replicated by any other existing medium today." Responding to concerns that VR might one day replace the theater experience, he said, "I don't think anything will ever replace anything," and pointed to the stage play and opera as forms that remain distinct to this day.

Recognition

Year	Recognition	Work	Source
2017	Best VR award, Venice Virtual Reality competition, 74th Venice International Film Festival	Arden's Wake (Expanded)
2018	SXSW Interactive Innovation Award, VR and AR category (to Penrose Studios)	Maestro

Penrose's company biography also states that Goldman Sachs named Chung one of its "100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs" in 2016 and that the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader and Cultural Leader for its annual meeting in Davos.

See also

• Oculus Story Studio
• Cinematic VR
• Tribeca Immersive
• Venice Immersive