This is the first of what will be a regular series of extended interviews that I’ll post on Sundays.

And these extensive deep-dive interviews are possible in large part to the financial support of my readers.

Light Sail VR co-founder and chief creative director Matthew Celia has spent the past decade watching immersive filmmaking evolve from a technological curiosity into something that increasingly resembles a real production medium. When he and his partners started the company in 2015, creating VR films meant cobbling together rigs from GoPros, wrestling with enormous files and limited playback hardware, and trying to make work for audiences wearing bulky headsets with crude controls and disappointing resolution. The technology was exciting, but the business case was anything but clear.

That tension remains at the center of the immersive industry. Early predictions that VR would become a multitrillion-dollar business quickly collided with the realities of production costs, fragmented distribution and limited headset adoption. For Celia, the answer has never been simply better technology. It has been better storytelling — and, increasingly, a production infrastructure that makes immersive work practical to create, distribute and monetize.

Light Sail VR, which won an Emmy in 2025, has positioned itself at that intersection of filmmaking and technology. The company has worked to develop production pipelines that can accommodate emerging formats while using automation and AI to reduce the cost and complexity of the work. Celia argues that the next stage of immersive media will depend less on selling people on the novelty of putting on a headset and more on creating compelling experiences that audiences actually want to seek out.

That could mean location-based and ticketed experiences, new forms of distribution, or projects designed from the outset to move across multiple platforms. In this conversation, Celia discusses the limitations that shaped immersive filmmaking's early years, why the industry still hasn't fully cracked its business model, how AI can help without displacing the creative process, and why he believes immersive media may finally be approaching the kind of repeatable production model that television developed decades ago.

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Q: You founded the company roughly a decade ago. What did the technology look like then, and how did that limit what you were able to do?

A: I feel like the last 10 years have been the promise of the next thing. And I think we're still in the promise of the next thing, but it's getting so much better.

So, back then — it was 2015. My business partner, Robert, who's now my business partner and has also been a really close friend for about 25 years, came over with his iPhone and a piece of cardboard. We put the phone in the cardboard, and I watched something from Chris Milk's company, Within, which was called Walking New York.

The story was very mediocre, but there was this shot from a helicopter where you're looking around and seeing all of New York City. You could look wherever you wanted just by moving your head. You felt like you were on the helicopter.

Sure, the image was blurry. Sure, it was on a piece of cardboard that I had to hold up to my face. But it was so captivating.

This was 2015, and it blew my mind. I'm a documentary filmmaker nerd, so I love the real world. I love telling real stories. I love not cutting. And this was everything I'd ever wanted in the creative art of filmmaking.

Back then, there were lots of things that were technically very challenging. Our first VR camera was 10 GoPros and a 3D-printed rig. We went with 10 instead of six. Most people were using six, but six put a stitch line — a seam where the two cameras would join — right in the middle of your shot. That seemed very silly to me because that's where all the action is. That's where your heroes are. We wanted to prioritize that for storytelling.

So I went with 10, which was really good, because people said our first work was super clean and they were blown away by how seamless it was. But GoPros weren't professional cameras. You couldn't really see what was going on. Not to mention, it's 360 degrees, so it's not like you can stand behind the camera, either.

That was a thing. And there were 10 points of failure, 10 microSD cards, 10 power supplies. It was just such a nightmare.

Then, once you got through all the technology of actually capturing it, you had to figure out how to play it back. Distribution was the other crazy part.

You had the Oculus DK2 and Google Cardboard back then, but these were horrible experiences for audiences. They were bulky and heavy. The software was janky. How do you interact with it? There were no controllers, no eye tracking, no hand tracking — none of the cool stuff we have today.

And the resolution was garbage. They were always saying, "It's 4K." But when you take 4K resolution and stretch it over 180 degrees vertically, you're somewhere in the ballpark of 12 pixels per degree in terms of how many pixels are filling the space.

If you look at your monitor — if you're on a Mac, for example — that's something like 200 pixels per degree. You're at Retina-level resolution. It's super dense, sharp and crisp.

That's what audiences were expecting. So they put this on and still had this amazing, "Oh my God, I can look anywhere!" reaction. But the number one response was, "This is super blurry."

Thirty frames a second meant that movement was choppy. The 3D was often terrible — really bad. So we've come a long way in 11 years.

I remember all of that. And I appreciate your Netflix article that you just published, because I love that you have that skeptical perspective on things. I kept hearing all these people in tech saying, "It's going to be a multitrillion-dollar industry in three years." And I was looking at where we were and thinking, "There's no way." There were just too many technological problems to solve for a medium to explode in 10 years.

So I've always felt that the trajectory of immersive film is much more like the birth of cinema than the birth of tech. Although I guess you could make the argument that going from a Gordon Gekko-style cell phone to the iPhone took 20 years, too.

Q: My audience is typically made up of people who are in the industry but not necessarily in your industry, so they don't really understand the history or the perspective. Listening to you talk about what it was like at that point, it strikes me that the legacy of all those big promises — the metaverse, all this stuff that was supposed to happen — is that people now see immersive technology as a hobby or a toy that didn't quite work out. You have to get past all those failed expectations of what it was supposed to be.

A: And the money that was spent back then was just insane. People were lighting thousands, tens of thousands of dollars on fire.

When you look at a piece like Hero that Google did — an amazing short film — it cost something like $3 million. Where's the return on that?

I feel like one of the big problems I've always seen in the VR and immersive-media industry is that it's really driven by tech. It's really driven by Google, Apple and Meta. And the way these companies operate — the way tech operates in general — has always been, "Let's break it. Let's innovate. Let's lose a bunch of money, and then we'll figure out the model later."

But how do people make money doing this stuff? I think the central question now, 11 years later, is that the technology is a lot better, adoption is growing, and new stuff is coming out, but we still haven't really cracked a business model for this format in a decade.

I think that's the next great thing that needs to happen.

Q: How does that affect what you do on a day-to-day basis? You're creating things, but how do you find the market for them? Or how do you convince people that there's a market for them?

A: I think Lightsail has been really lucky for two reasons. One, we're very passionate about what we do.

A lot of people got into it around 2016, when all the money was pouring in, thinking, "I'm going to make a lot of money doing this." And I was like, "There's no market here, guys." And sure enough, they all ate their lunch, went bankrupt and moved on to Bitcoin or crypto, whatever the next hot thing was.

I actually ran into one of them at a party. She's a serial entrepreneur who's been through something like 10 bankruptcies in the last 10 years, and she just jumped onto whatever hype train was next. She looked ragged, by the way.

But we were small because we're small, scrappy and efficient, and we're utilizing technology. We also sit at this intersection. Rob and I are film-school kids, so we know how to speak to agencies, Hollywood, film production and all that stuff. But we're also very technical, so we know how to speak to tech, Silicon Valley and all that jazz.

We were kind of at this perfect nexus point in the middle.

Silicon Valley got into Hollywood in a big way over the last decade. And we sat there — small, super nimble, super agile — while all of our competition basically left the sphere.

So for the small number of people who still want to do immersive work — which maybe isn't the most popular thing that's going to shatter records, but there is still a healthy audience of people who really love this stuff — we became one of the only shops in the country able to handle a large volume of this kind of work.

A lot of that was thanks to Meta continuing to invest heavily in this and us being able to say to Meta, "Hey, we're going to take care of you because we fundamentally believe in this mission just like you do."

Our pipeline to business right now has been much more about being a service company for the industry. "Hey, you have a project. We'll make sure it looks good. You need help on set with an immersive supervisor? Let us come and help you make that successful."

Rather than being a production company pitching content and original series — which, by the way, I still really want to do, and we still are working on stuff — I think that's still a little early.

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Q: Having spent so much time around the tech industry — I was working as a financial reporter in the Bay Area 25 years ago during the tech crash — I'm familiar with the mindset. One overarching idea in the tech world is that creative stuff is essentially secondary. Art isn't useless, but it's the least important part of the conversation. Art can be created by AI or whatever. You don't need a decent script; you just need something flashy. How do you fight that mindset? Because it's definitely out there, and as you know, you need a story at the end of the day.

A: Boy, you've nailed it. You've nailed what tech thinks about the creative arts in such a beautiful, succinct way. And I couldn't agree more. I also think it's the thing they fundamentally always get wrong.

There are a lot of people who say, "The box office is dead. Audiences aren't going to movies anymore." But then you have films like Obsession or Backrooms, small indie projects with a very clear creative vision, strong execution, strong voice and strong storytelling, and audiences flock to them.

And everyone's trying to figure out why.

Well, the answer is so simple: they're good.

Audiences will go to a movie if there's a movie they want to see. I have two young kids, and for a long time right after the pandemic, there was nothing for children. There were no family films — full stretches of months at the multiplex where there was nothing out there that looked even remotely appealing.

No wonder we got into the habit of staying home and watching Netflix.

I think tech likes to think it's the technology that makes it. And this is the AI thing that's happening right now. Everyone's saying, "Oh, yeah, I can make your movie. I can make your movie."

But you look at a company like Innovative Dreams, which I think is actually using AI successfully. They did Young Washington and Book of Moses or House of David. I think Moses was the biggest thing for Amazon.

Are these Emmy Award-winning, cream-of-the-crop, super-top-shelf productions? That's for other people besides me to judge. Taste is a thing. But I do think you can watch their stuff and you'd be hard-pressed to identify which shots were made with AI and which weren't.

There are something like 300 shots that are fully AI-generated, and you're like, "How?"

I think it's because there's still human art behind it. They're still capturing a performance. They're still filmmakers who came from that community, and they're proving out the model.

We can build all this technology. If you don't have a story to tell with it, it's useless.

That was Steve Jobs' whole thing with Apple, right? It's like, "Hey, we're a computer company. We're also an arts company. We tell stories. We make people feel things."

That's why Lightsail got started. Maybe that's a little bit about why we've had success. Our whole mantra is: story first.

That was built because all of those demos I saw back in 2015, Rick, were super interesting, but they had no storytelling. They had no weight, no characters that I fell in love with. They didn't change my mind about how I felt about anything.

They just felt like tech demos.

For better or worse, I've succeeded sometimes and failed a whole lot more, but we've always tried to push that art angle with the technology. I think that's important.

Q: That ties into something else I was thinking about with you and the company. I saw an interview you did, I think at CES recently, where there was a lot of discussion about how you use AI in the process and the editing. That's all well and good, but how do you keep that from getting in the way of the art? How do you avoid relying too much on AI because it makes your process easier, but in the process lose something?

A: I think every new technology creates the need for new skills to use that technology. The skill now is going to be how we use AI.

The problem is that right now we're in the buzz phase of AI, where AI is everything to everyone and all things all the time. We've seen this tech cycle again and again and again.

The reality is, AI will be really good for certain things. It'll be terrible for other things. That'll shake out. And then the way that we use AI will be the secret sauce, because it's just a tool.

It's like using a brush in Photoshop. It's a tool that allows you to do something faster than you were able to before.

The case where I use it is, if I need to plow through 10 hours of interviews, I can use AI to help find every single person who talked about the water cycle in the Atchafalaya Basin. Boom — time codes, everything. Write a little tool to do that with Claude, no problem.

That just helps organize my thoughts, something that would take me a really long time.

Look, I have the option to take a really long time and do that by hand. I do. I'm a human. I can make choices.

But I also have the option to think, "Given the fact that my budgets are low, my timelines are short and we're hustling in a very quickly changing entertainment landscape, how can I optimize myself for success?"

If I can lean on agents to help do the busy-work parts of my job so that I can spend more time noodling about whether this section is better before that section, whether I need to go out and get more B-roll or whatever, I think that's a more valuable use of my brain than filling out a spreadsheet for two and a half hours.

That's how I really see using AI.

We've actually done a lot recently at Lightsail to optimize things and automate loops — exporting video files, reformatting them and so on.

Tech companies love to have a different immersive file format for every headset. Your Quest is different from your Pico, which is different from your Apple Vision Pro.

Thanks, Apple, for a brand-new format that no one asked for.

But the problem is that making them play nicely with everybody requires jumping through so many hoops. These are exports that can take half a day on the latest Mac hardware.

Making sure you can automate that with AI saves you time, saves you headaches and gets me more sleep, which is good for everybody.

So I guess the short answer — sorry, this is a long answer — is that these are just tools. How you use them is entirely dependent on the human and how that person chooses to engage with them.

My wife is very anti-AI, and I think she doesn't understand it. She's like, "How do I even get started with it?"

I go, "Just ask it."

She'd be like, "Hi, how can you be useful for me?"

Just chat.

And I think that lit up something in her brain once she stopped thinking of it as a weird tech thing and started thinking of it as just another human.

I thought that was pretty magical.

Q: You talked earlier about how tough the business model was early on, and even now. What do you think has to happen for your budgets to get a little bigger and for immersive media to move higher on people's priority lists?

A: That's a great question. And I'm of two minds about it a little bit. I've been weighing this all summer.

Historically, media has been a monolithic thing. You had radio. That was the Top 40. You had record companies that really controlled which artists were recording and releasing music. You had movie theaters and big studios releasing big tentpole movies.

What we've seen in the last decade has been a real shift toward the creator economy.

YouTube has, I think, a million channels of creators. Those are legitimate sources of entertainment. It's a lot of work to do a show, and they're creating. They don't need anybody else.

Music artists can record a mult-Grammy-winning album in their bedroom, like Billie Eilish.

What this has done is take that monolithic culture and create what I call niche culture, where you have pockets of very passionate individuals who love something, and they love it so hard, but it'll never reach four-quadrant, stratospheric levels.

Maybe not never, but rarely.

But maybe it's okay that we have all of these niche things because we have so much content, the ease of distributing it and the lowering cost of creating it.

Many people who have stories to tell can reach their audience, make a decent living, have a decent fan base, and that's okay.

So at Lightsail, we're trying to lower the cost of production. AI is helping do that a lot — optimizing, keeping what we want on the screen, making things easier for us. That's a big unlock.

All this AI tooling is really important because if we lower the cost of production, then we don't need to make as much to still be happy, feed our families and have a decent lifestyle.

I'm not trying to beat Elon Musk. I'm just trying to live in Southern California and raise two kids.

If we can do that, keep our costs low and continue to grow the market through really good entertainment and by providing reasons why people might want to get in, that's a win.

My heartbeat has been that we need to treat this like the dawn of television. Immersive media needs to come out every week with something compelling that people want to watch, kind of like the TV that used to have variety shows like American Bandstand and stuff.

You had to tune in for it. You had to get in. It started to create a habit with audiences.

The problem right now is that everything is super sporadic and fragmented. It's hard to create that kind of habit when people can very easily just pick up their phone and scroll YouTube.

So I think Meta's VR glasses that were announced last week are kind of a big deal, because it's the first time a form factor has come out at this price point that has all the features of the Quest, is designed for media consumption and feels like you're not wearing anything on your face.

Is it perfect? No. Nothing's perfect.

But do I think it solves the number one issue people have with jumping into immersive media — that the headset is too heavy, too bulky and I don't really want to wear it?

A thousand percent.

So I'm really interested to see next year, when that goes on sale. I hope it's super successful, because it's definitely a headset more geared toward work. Consumption of media is a thing, but I think it will be more like the Mac computer, where everyone got it and some people got it for work.

My dad had a Mac SE, and he used to do page layout on it. That was his job. And then I would play on it, and I became a computer nerd. That's what made me into what I am today.

I think that generational shift is going to happen with immersive media as well.

Q: Well, this seems like a good place to wrap it up. I don't want to take too much of your time, and I have a feeling I could talk to you for a couple of hours about this stuff. It's really interesting to hear your perspective. I don't think immersive media in general gets as much attention as it should, particularly from the industry.

So let’s end with the standard interview ending question…what does Lightsail have coming out next?

A: We have a lot of stuff coming out.

We just had a piece featuring Draymond Green, Undergoing Therapy, launch yesterday. It's called Open Season, and that's pretty insane as a show — putting a VR camera into a therapy session with an NBA player and doing six episodes.

I think that actually doesn't get enough attention, because it's not just one episode; it's six.

And that's the heartbeat I'm talking about. We're making series. We're really investing.

It's not just tech demos. We're actually making shows with Paramount, with Skydance. Chris was on The Amazing Race. I think he's got a couple of Emmys for that. He was the showrunner on this.

That kind of talent coming into this space — I'd watch that pretty closely over the next year.

I think it's going to be pretty huge.

Q: I have to admit, I've played around with headsets a lot over the last few years. I don't own one that's anywhere close to the current model, but I'm encouraged to give it a shot now and get more fluent in this, because I'm caught up in your enthusiasm.

A: That's great.

Look, if you wait until next spring for the VR glasses, I would go for those. I think they're, what, $1,299?

You could work in them. You could watch media in them. You can do video conferencing in them.

Whereas I think the Quest is a great headset for around $400. It's so much cheaper, right? It's an Xbox.

That's what it is. It's an Xbox interface.

So this new VR-glasses headset — it's not even a headset. They're glasses. We should stop calling it a headset.

It is a monumental leap, I think.