Capturing Everest

Capturing Everest was the first complete bottom-to-top virtual reality ascent of Mount Everest — zip-line- and harness-mounted 360 rigs, shot on location over roughly two months in spring 2016, in conditions that required custom cold-weather capture equipment and drones built specifically for the mountain. It released in May 2017 as four VR chapters (The Journey, The Blessing, The Icefall, The Summit) on the LIFE VR app, alongside an SI.com microsite and Sports Illustrated’s first AR print issue.

The project won the Sports Emmy for Outstanding Digital Innovation on 8 May 2018 — the Emmy citation credits Sports Illustrated, LIFE VR, and Endemol Shine Beyond USA as the corporate winners.

Role, precisely: Panogs built the cold-weather 360 capture rigs used on the mountain — the hardware that made the shoot survivable and the footage possible. That’s the honest, checkable version, and it’s still extraordinary: extreme-environment rig engineering for the first VR project of its kind, on the world’s tallest mountain, for a production that went on to win a Sports Emmy.