From Leia Inc. to Immersity: Our Journey of Immersive Innovation

Every company has a story. Ours began more than a decade ago with a vision: to make digital experiences feel as real, vivid, and natural as the world around us. Today, that vision has grown into Immersity, a unified platform bringing immersive storytelling to millions of people worldwide. But like all great stories, ours had humble beginnings in a place no one would have expected.

The Spark: From a Parking Lot to a Breakthrough

In 2014, our founder Dr. David Fattal, a world-renowned physicist from Stanford University, was working at HP Labs when a fire drill unexpectedly interrupted his day. Sent outside with his lab materials in hand, David found himself in the parking lot, sunlight streaming across his work. He noticed the way the beams of light bent and scattered through his optics — a simple observation that sparked a revolutionary idea. From that moment, the foundation of holographic Lightfield technology was born.

What began as an accident of circumstance quickly transformed into something far greater. That flash of inspiration set David on a mission not just to advance display technology, but to change the way people experience digital content. It wasn’t enough to simply see an image — the goal became to make people feel it. This mission, to create immersive technology that unlocks human emotion, continues to guide us today.

The Beginning: A Breakthrough Lab

A year earlier, in 2013, research at HP Labs had already hinted at what was possible. That work, later published in Nature, demonstrated how diffraction-based techniques could engineer depth on a flat display. While the experiments were early and the images imperfect, they revealed the potential to bring holographic-like visuals into everyday devices.

By 2014, this research spun out into a startup named Leia Inc., a nod to the famous hologram of Princess Leia in Star Wars. From the very beginning, Leia was founded with the belief that immersive display and AI technologies could blend digital content with the physical world in ways never seen before. The earliest prototypes were rough, but they proved that immersive experiences were possible outside of research labs. Those humble beginnings laid the groundwork for a vision we call Spatial Intelligence, a new generation of AI where digital content isn’t flat, but immersive.

Building the First Products

The years that followed were defined by experimentation, risk-taking, and rapid innovation. In 2014, Leia released its first developer kit, a platform that opened the door for creators to explore 3D content and test the possibilities of lightfield technology in a real device. It was an early step, but it gave developers and partners a glimpse of what could be achieved with immersive content.

By 2017, Leia had its most high-profile opportunity yet: creating the 3D lightfield screen for the RED Hydrogen One smartphone. The timeline was short — just six months — but the team delivered. This milestone was more than just a product launch; it was proof that immersive technology could be built for real-world consumer devices.

In 2020, Leia launched the Lume Pad, the first immersive tablet powered by Switchable-Display technology. It marked the moment immersive displays stepped out of the lab and into the hands of everyday users. For the first time, people could hold a device that didn’t just display flat content but presented images and videos with depth, presence, and motion. Each of these products wasn’t simply about hardware — they were evidence that immersive experiences could be portable, practical, and personal.

Growth and Global Expansion

As Leia’s technology matured, the company expanded its reach. What began as a small Silicon Valley startup quickly grew into a global enterprise with offices in California, the Netherlands, and China, and a team of more than 200 associates worldwide. This global footprint allowed Leia to collaborate with industry leaders and scale its innovations beyond prototypes and individual products.

In 2023, Leia took another significant step forward by acquiring Dimenco and Royal Philips’ 3D patent portfolio. With that acquisition, our patent library grew to over 2,000 patents — the largest in the immersive display industry. This achievement not only solidified Leia’s leadership position but also provided partners and customers with the confidence that our solutions were both innovative and protected. It was a moment that marked Leia’s transition from being an ambitious startup to becoming the recognized leader in immersive Switchable-Display technology, with the largest IP portfolio, globally.

The Shift: From Hardware to AI

By 2024, the world of AI was accelerating, and Leia was ready to evolve once again. That year, we reintroduced ourselves to the world with Immersity AI, a software platform designed to take any 2D photo and instantly transform it into something alive with depth, presence, and motion. This was a major shift away from a hardware-first identity to a broader vision of immersive experiences available to anyone.

At the heart of Immersity AI was technology that generated precise depth maps from ordinary 2D images, then added natural motion and dimensional cues to transform static content into immersive experiences.  Instead of flat visuals, users saw depth, perspective and movement that allowed them to step into the scene.  By late 2024, this capability was powering animated album art on Apple Music – bringing immersive storytelling to millions of listeners and showing how seamlessly our technology could integrate into existing creative ecosystems.

Immersity for Everyone

In 2025, we took another bold leap: making immersive technology truly accessible to everyone. The release of Immersity 4.0 significantly improved the quality of depth rendering, delivering smoother transitions and more natural results. Shortly after, we launched Immersity for Mobile, a free app for iOS and Android. For the first time, anyone could take a photo with their phone and transform it into something cinematic.

This expansion into mobile put Immersity directly into people’s hands. From families capturing meaningful memories to creators producing social content, Immersity for Mobile became the simplest way to turn everyday moments into immersive stories. It marked a true democratization of immersive technology, making it accessible, emotional, and part of daily life.

The Evolution into Immersity

By August 2025, we introduced Immersity as the unified platform that brings together our legacy in hardware, our breakthroughs in AI, and our unmatched patent portfolio into one cohesive platform. The name change symbolized not just a rebrand of existing technologies but an evolution: from pioneering holographic displays to creating a technology platform for immersive storytelling.

Immersity platform is the only technology that can be seamlessly integrated into any personal device from phones to monitors to laptops to mobile-phones, thanks to Immersity, users can easily switch between displaying digital content to projecting it as an immersive experience, feeling part of the scene.

Today, the Immersity Platform transforms any digital content into experiences across all platforms. It’s not technology built for a niche audience — it’s built for everyone. It’s accessible, seamless, and emotional. And it’s redefining what it means to connect, create, and share in the digital age.

Our Mission Today

What began as a spark of sunlight in a parking lot has become a global purpose. Our mission today is clear: to make immersive experiences available to anyone, on any device. We want to inspire creativity by turning everyday content into extraordinary stories. And we want to shape a future where digital doesn’t just sit on a screen, it brings you into the scene. Because while immersive experiences themselves aren’t new, the way we are doing it is different. By combining the power of human vision with AI, Immersity is making immersive storytelling part of daily life, right in the palm of your hand.

Looking Ahead

From a lab experiment to the world’s largest immersive display patent portfolio, from hardware prototypes to AI-powered storytelling, our journey has been extraordinary. Yet we see it only as the beginning.

As Immersity, we are building a future where immersive experiences are natural, emotional, and unforgettable. A future where digital content is immersive and where storytelling goes beyond the screen.

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