Peripheral hires former Meta Reality Labs exec to lead volumetric video push

Toronto AI startup Peripheral Labs has brought on former Meta Reality Labs head of product Shaun Carrigan as its first chief product officer (CPO).

Peripheral is building spatial intelligence tech for the sports market, namely volumetric video capture and markerless tracking infrastructure for live sports. Carrigan, who is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, quietly joined the company in June. The veteran sports tech leader has been tasked with heading product and go-to-market for Peripheral’s volumetric platform.

“I was so impressed with what they had already built in such a short period of time.”
Shaun Carrigan,
Peripheral

“They were so far ahead on the technology that it was time to jump in,” Carrigan told BetaKit in an exclusive interview. “I was so impressed with what they had already built in such a short period of time.”

Carrigan said he was attracted to the strength of the Peripheral team, which he said is well on its way to tackling the three major barriers to volumetric video: quality, cost, and speed.

Founded in 2024 by CEO Kelvin Cui and CTO Mustafa Khan, a pair of University of Toronto robotics graduates and former self-driving racecar builders, Peripheral is developing a large reconstruction model (LRM) capable of quickly turning two-dimensional images captured by cameras into fully navigable, 3D video for live sports and coaching. That tech is built on breakthroughs in robotics and autonomous vehicle perception.

In May, Peripheral established what it claims was North America’s first biomechanics basketball shooting lab outside of the NBA. Two months ago, the startup announced another $8.7 million USD ($12.4 million CAD) in seed funding led by Toronto’s Deloitte Ventures and Montréal-based Inovia Capital, with support from existing backers Khosla Ventures and Entrepreneurs First.

Carrigan said he felt like he had a good understanding of what the next five years could look like for Peripheral and the experience the company was looking for as it looks to deploy its tech. “[I] had already done that at Intel and was ready to do that again.”

Carrigan’s love of sports was inspired by his father’s work on the sidelines for the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers, and fostered during his time playing baseball as a little league pitcher. He has been working in media and sports tech since the early 2000s. During this time, he amassed three United States patents in virtual camera systems and five Emmy Awards for technical innovation, the latter of which he attributed to working “on big shows with incredibly bright people.”

Carrigan joined Chicago’s Sportvision in 2004, and during his 11 years with the company he helped develop tech that has since become standard in sports broadcasting, from the MLB’s PITCHf/x system—which he spent time in Toronto working on with the Blue Jays—to the NFL’s Next Gen Stats and yellow first down line.

After a brief stint at UK-based sports tech company STATS, Carrigan spent six years as director of product and experience at Intel Sports, where he claimed he led production of the first Winter Olympics in virtual reality and worked with the NFL to launch sports’ first interactive volumetric experience.

“I realized there that volumetric video is the future,” Carrigan said. “The question isn’t if, the question is when.”

After Intel wound down Intel Sports, Carrigan moved to Meta Reality Labs in 2022, where he led a team working on the future of mixed reality and what the metaverse might look like. The US social media giant has since scaled back those plans dramatically to focus on AI, and Carrigan says he left Meta Reality Labs last year for personal reasons. Following his departure, he considered building his own volumetric startup before meeting with Cui.

While Carrigan’s near-term focus at Peripheral will be on providing clips to broadcasters for live and social media replays, he also sees plenty of other applications for the company’s volumetric tech. For now, he’s “looking forward to bringing Peripheral’s content in front of millions of people.”

Feature image courtesy Peripheral Labs.