Icelandic virtual reality (VR) developer startup Sólfar Studios ehf. raised $2.1 million in seed funding from both Nordic and Asian venture capital investors. The seed round includes Shanda Group, Tianqiao Chen’sprivate investment group, Iceland´s NSA Ventures, and Finnish VCs Inventure and Reaktor Ventures along with individual investors from the company´s previous angel round.

Sólfar Studios is a VR developer startup and has a star-list of co-founders who moved from CCP Games (CCP hf.), the developer and publisher of the epic space battle massively multiplayer online (MMO) game EVE Online.

Reynir Hardarson co-founded CCP in 1997 and acted as the company’s Global Creative Director; Kjartan Pierre Emilsson founded CCP´s Shanghai studio and led game design for the original EVE Online team; and Thor Gunnarsson was most recently VP Business Development at CCP.

The company was founded in 2014 with a mission to create immersive, engaging VR experiences and games. The company hopes to define the medium of VR entertainment and rise to become a category leader in the market.

“It´s a privilege to welcome a strong and visionary investor group from the Nordic countries and Asia to fuel our growth into the fascinating field of VR,” said Kjartan Pierre Emilsson CEO and co-founder of Sólfar. “By benefiting from their strong network, experience and access to a global talent pool, we are dramatically accelerating Sólfar’s ability to create trailblazing content for this medium of the future.”

EVEREST VR: Conquer the mountain in virtual reality

This week the company unveiled its second product at the VRX conference in San Francisco: EVEREST VR. With this entertainment product, in partnership with RVX, a leading Nordic visual effects and animation house, Sólfar Studios intends to bring the mountain (Mount Everest) to VR users.

“The premise of EVEREST VR is simple. Preparing for your expedition at Basecamp, you will traverse the Khumbu Icefalls, scale Lhotse Face, ascend the Hillary Step, and finally conquer the summit of Everest,” the company says in the release. “You will learn to respect the mountain, you may even survive the encounter. You will leave the experience feeling like you were there.“

The effect is designed to be a breathtaking experience utilizing what is called the definitive CGI model of Everest for high-end VR platforms. To deliver the experience, the company uses Nvidia‘s GeForce GTX TITAN X GPU to churn through over 300,000 high resolution images of the mountain range via a highly detailed 3D point cloud. Once that simulation is in place, the 3D mesh and textures are then loaded through the video hardware.

Sólfar is working with Nvidia Corporation to prepare EVEREST VR for VR-ready PCs to take advantage of the software as soon as it launches. The release also mentions that the simulation is built in Unreal Engine 4, the same engine behind the hit survival game Studio Wildcard’s ARK: Survival Evolved and Lion Head Studio’s Fable Legends.

The debut date of EVEREST VR is expected in 2016.

Image credit: Courtesy of Sólfar Studios