Introducing LightTwist

An iPhone app that turns your room into a customizable virtual video studio

A few months ago, I wrote about planning to start a new company in the computer vision / spatial computing space. There were a few ideas but I hadn’t yet decided which one to focus on yet. I was lucky to get a chance to be part of the Ycombinator Winter 2021 batch, iterating through about 5 different ideas, and finally landing on something I’m very excited about!

What is LightTwist?

LightTwist is an iPhone app that turns your room into a customizable virtual video studio. You can capture live and recorded videos that make you and your space look amazing, even in your bedroom or basement.

LightTwist was inspired by the virtual production technology used to film the Mandalorian. They shoot each episode on the same physical set but use a huge LED stage, Unreal Engine, and a lot of GPUs to render the backdrop in real time for each scene.

We’re making virtual production tech accessible to creators on the iPhone without needing special equipment or 3D game engine knowledge. We’re leveraging all of the sensing and compute on the iPhone itself for realtime feedback and recording, and a powerful GPU server for higher quality post production and rendering using Unreal Engine.

Here’s a quick demo video from an early prototype:

Captured with an iPhone 12 Pro in a basement, rendered on a server using Unreal Engine.

Early Access

We’re looking for early customers to work closely with. We’ll cover the cost of building and customizing a 3D virtual studio for you and iterate quickly on bugs and feature requests.

If you’re creating videos for YouTube, social media, or your business and are looking for ways to improve production value and reduce the amount of post-production work we’d love to hear from you!

You can sign up here for early access, or feel free to email at hello@lighttwist.io.

Join LightTwist!

With LightTwist you have a chance to join a super early startup at the ground floor. We’re building a fully remote team that’ll have a mix of skills including computer vision, creative video production, 3D art, and community building. Though it’s early, we can provide very meaningful ownership in LightTwist as well as a reasonable salary.

We don’t care what degrees you have or which university you went to. We’re looking for people that are ambitious, fast learning, excellent at communication, intellectually honest, and have a track record of building awesome things.

Founding computer vision/3D graphics software engineer: We’re looking for an experienced software engineer who is comfortable building performant software in C++ across platforms (e.g. iOS / PC) and understands 3D math. Ideally you have 3D computer vision and/or 3D graphics experience as well.

Founding creative director / community manager: We’re looking for someone with a creative mind, video production experience, and hacking skills to help us put out exciting examples using LightTwist - even when it’s early and buggy. Eventually this role would evolve into helping build and foster a community of creatives and creators using LightTwist.

Neither of these roles a fit for you but you’re excited about LightTwist and have an idea for how you can help? Reach out anyways!

Stay tuned / say hello!

We’re got some exciting news upcoming on both funding and advisors - stay tuned!

We’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in joining the team, want to get early access to LightTwist, or have ideas on how we can collaborate! Say hello@lighttwist.io.