Kite & Lightning

Kite & Lightning
Information
Industry	Virtual reality, video games
Founded	2013
Founder	Cory Strassburger, Ikrima Elhassan
Headquarters	Los Angeles, California, United States
Notable Personnel	Cory Strassburger (co-founder, creative director), Ikrima Elhassan (co-founder)
Products	Senza Peso, GE Neuro, INSURGENT: Shatter Reality, Bebylon Battle Royale

Kite & Lightning is a Los Angeles virtual reality studio founded in 2013 by Cory Strassburger and Ikrima Elhassan. It made some of the early demos for the Oculus Rift development kits, including the VR mini-opera Senza Peso (2014), and then built branded VR experiences for clients such as NBC, GE and Lionsgate.

From 2015 the studio worked on its own multiplayer game, Bebylon Battle Royale, a comedic vehicle-combat brawler about immortal babies. It raised a 2.5 million US dollar seed round for the game in 2016. While making the game, Strassburger built a low-cost motion capture pipeline from an iPhone X, an Xsens suit and Unreal Engine, which won at SIGGRAPH 2018's Real-Time Live! session. The game was announced for a 2016 launch and was still unreleased in the most recent reports on its status, from 2020.

Reviewed 11 October 2026. Founding, founders' backgrounds, early Rift demos and Genesis, The Voice, GE Subsea, Insurgent and GE Neuro client work, Paris move, 2016 seed round and investors, Bebylon announcement, Tribeca 2017 premiere, 2018 Unreal Dev Grant, SIGGRAPH 2018 award, 2019-2022 reporting and Steam release dates, each checked against the cited sources. About review dates.

History

Founding and first demos (2013-2014)

Strassburger and Elhassan founded the studio in 2013. Before that, Strassburger had a career of about two decades in visual effects and motion graphics. The ACM SIGGRAPH Blog lists him as a two-time Emmy Award winner whose work appeared in the films Minority Report and Star Trek and the television series The X-Files, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Smallville. Elhassan had spent 14 years in technology at Microsoft, Intel and Nvidia and had been a Turing Scholar at the University of Texas. Road to VR described the studio in 2014 as a creative development studio with past work in augmented reality that had more recently moved into virtual reality.

In a June 2014 interview on the Voices of VR podcast, Strassburger said the arrival of the Oculus Rift DK1, "right fresh from the Kickstarter", shifted the team's priorities toward VR. He named K&L Station and The Cave as its first VR demos.

Senza Peso followed in June 2014. It was a VR companion to a short-film mini-opera about a Siren who escorts the souls of the newly dead into the afterlife. The film had taken five years to make, and the studio built the VR version in eight weeks from the film's assets, using Unreal Engine 4. On the podcast, Elhassan said the team had moved from Unity to Unreal Engine 4 because of source code access, faster prototyping and Epic's monthly updates. Instead of motion capture, the performers were filmed in stereoscopic live action against a green screen and mapped onto billboards in the scene. An updated version of Senza Peso was released free on Steam on 11 October 2016.

The studio also built Genesis, shown to Road to VR in June 2014. It was a stationary polyhedral frame of metal beams with a padded bed hung in the middle, eight speakers and a fan on the bars, and two subwoofers and three tactile transducers under the bed. Michael Bradford had designed the frame in 1997 as an audio-only musical therapy device. Strassburger acquired it secondhand from a friend of Bradford's, added Oculus Rift visuals made in Unity, and built the audio and visuals in about a week. The studio said it had no plans to sell it.

Client work (2014-2015)

The studio's paid projects in this period were VR promotions for television, film and corporate clients. Its founders described three of them in a talk at the VRDC at GDC 2016: NBC's The Voice (a live-action experience), Lionsgate's Insurgent (live action combined with heavy visual effects) and GE's Neuro (fully computer-generated).

In November 2014 GE opened a 500 million US dollar research center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, focused on subsea factories for extracting oil and gas. GE commissioned Kite & Lightning to make a VR experience to mark the launch; Road to VR's Rev VR Podcast later referred to it as the GE Subsea Experience. Road to VR described it as an educational on-rails ride in which a futuristic submersible descends about 4 miles to the sea floor, with heads-up information about the pressures that deepwater equipment has to withstand.

INSURGENT: Shatter Reality was a promotional piece for Lionsgate's film The Divergent Series: Insurgent that puts the viewer through one of the film's simulation tests. It runs about four minutes and was built in Unreal Engine 4. According to Elhassan, the Oculus Rift DK2 version on Oculus Share supported positional tracking and interactive moments, while the Samsung Gear VR, Milk VR and Google Cardboard versions were scripted stereo 360-degree video. A touring version used a haptic chair with actuators and a fan, built by The Thinking Box from the studio's designs. The actors were filmed on green screen with a stereo pair of Blackmagic cameras on a side stage of the film's set. Elhassan said the DK2 version had about 5,000 Oculus Share downloads in its first few days. For the project the studio wrote an Alembic cache playback plugin and a stereo 360 movie export plugin for Unreal Engine 4, and he said the export plugin would be released free and open source.

Neuro, made for GE with Deluxe, debuted at E3 in Los Angeles in June 2015. Post Magazine described it as a five-minute, fully computer-generated film developed with AMD graphics technology, starring a photoreal digital model of Reuben Wu of the band Ladytron, whose facial performance was captured and animated to match the narration. Strassburger and Elhassan were its creative directors. Engadget reported that the piece took the viewer through Wu's brain using his MRI data, and that it was due for release on Oculus Share and Samsung Milk VR. A Steam version, credited to Kite & Lightning in partnership with GE and AMD and using AMD's LiquidVR, came out free on 5 September 2016.

Paris and Bebylon (2015-2016)

In July 2015 the two founders left Los Angeles for Paris, where they spent a year on what UploadVR called artistic exploration. On 2 November 2015 the studio announced Bebylon: Battle Royale, which Road to VR called its "first proper self-published game". Elhassan described it as a "hybrid of Mario Kart party mode and Super Smash Bros." Set in a world where humans have found immortality but stop aging as babies, it was a multiplayer-only vehicle brawler starting with one-on-one matches on a miniature battlefield, with players seated around the table in VR. It was planned for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR in summer 2016. In a podcast write-up published the same day, Kent Bye reported that the team had relocated to Paris to prototype and develop the game, and that because the studio was aiming for a Rift launch title it was supporting gamepads and would not commit to touch controller support until later in development.

Seed funding and expansion (2016-2018)

On 26 July 2016 the studio announced a 2.5 million US dollar seed round led by Raine Ventures, with Courtside Ventures, the Comcast Ventures Catalyst Fund, Social Capital, Outpost Capital, Boost VC and Lytro CEO Jason Rosenthal also investing. Comcast's own announcement also listed Greycroft Partners among the seed investors and described the deal as Comcast Ventures' "first foray into VR gaming". The founders moved back to Los Angeles and set up in Santa Monica. TechCrunch reported that the studio had about two full-time employees and planned to hire two more.

The funding came with a larger plan for the game. Elhassan told Road to VR that the studio wanted "a mini-Sword Art Online... except in comedy", a social VR world with shows, rides and gambling dens outside the arenas. Spectators would be able to join for free, throw items into matches and bet on outcomes, and the studio would release content in chunks starting in early 2017, with cross-play between the Rift, Vive and PlayStation VR. Producer Jennifer Chavarria joined in October 2016. Bebylon Battle Royale had its world premiere as a three-minute piece in the Virtual Arcade at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, credited to Elhassan and Strassburger as directors.

In January 2018 Epic Games named the game in a round of Unreal Dev Grants that gave over 200,000 US dollars in total to 13 developers. Road to VR reported then that the game was in closed beta and due in 2018 for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

Motion capture work (2017-2019)

In November 2017 UploadVR reported that Strassburger had received an iPhone X on a Saturday and by the Sunday night had a working prototype that used its face-tracking camera to drive a Bebylon character in real time. He said it gave "better data than most anything I've seen when it comes to real-time" capture, and that combined with Eisko software and an Xsens suit it made an "incredibly cheap" capture pipeline. The rig grew into a helmet-mounted iPhone X and an Xsens suit for wireless body and facial capture, streamed into Unreal Engine in real time through IKINEMA LiveAction.

At SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver, Strassburger and Remco Sikkema presented "Democratising Mocap: Real-Time Full-Performance Motion Capture with an iPhone X, Xsens, and Maya" at Real-Time Live!. The ACM SIGGRAPH history archive lists it as the Real-Time Live! Best in Show winner, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Blog called the award "Best Real-Time Graphics and Interactivity". In April 2019 fxguide reported that Strassburger was stepping away from game production for about three months to make a short film with the Beby characters, intended to introduce the game's world before release, while the rest of the team worked on the game. The capture setup by then used ARKit blendshapes for the face, an Xsens MVN suit for the body, and Unreal Engine 4 for recording and rendering.

2020 and later

In June 2020 a new Bebylon website said the game would launch that year, joking that it was "coming 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020!" Road to VR noted that the planned chunked release starting in 2017 had never arrived and that the site no longer mentioned the earlier social-world plans. The studio also said it would pitch a multi-season animated series to networks later in 2020. In July 2020 Animation World Network reported that, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Strassburger was directing remote motion capture sessions with up to three actors in three different locations at once. The same report said the game was nearing early access and was due later that year, and that the pandemic had disrupted the plan to pitch the series to streaming networks.

In January 2022 the French site 3DVF covered Xanadu, a YouTube vlog concept by Strassburger with two alien characters, made with the Bebylon capture workflow plus Manus gloves for finger tracking and Epic Games' MetaHuman avatars. The 3DVF report did not give the game's status, and no public release of Bebylon Battle Royale has been reported since the 2020 coverage.

Products

Title	Year	Client or publisher	Platforms	Notes
K&L Station	By 2014	Kite & Lightning	Oculus Rift development kit	Early demo
The Cave	By 2014	Kite & Lightning	Oculus Rift development kit	Early demo
Senza Peso	June 2014	Kite & Lightning	Oculus Rift development kits; Steam (11 October 2016)	VR mini-opera made in Unreal Engine 4; the 2016 Steam release is covered at Senza Peso
Genesis	2014	Kite & Lightning	Oculus Rift in a custom bed-and-frame rig	Not sold
The Voice VR experience	2014	NBC		Live-action piece
GE Subsea Experience	November 2014	GE		Made for the opening of GE's research center in Rio de Janeiro
INSURGENT: Shatter Reality	March 2015	Lionsgate	Oculus Rift DK2 (Oculus Share), Samsung Gear VR, Google Cardboard, touring haptic chair	Promotion for The Divergent Series: Insurgent
Neuro	June 2015	GE	VR headsets at E3 2015; Steam (5 September 2016)	With Deluxe and AMD
Bebylon Battle Royale	Announced 2015	Kite & Lightning	Announced for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR	Tribeca premiere 2017; closed beta in 2018; no public release reported

See also

• Senza Peso
• Facial motion capture
• Cinematic VR