James George is an Emmy-award winning artist, entrepreneur and computer scientist who invented volumetric filmmaking. He is a pioneer in directing volumetric video experiences and leading software tool development.

He was CEO and Co-Founder of Scatter, a creative technology company that developed the original volumetric video capture software Depthkit. Depthkit was acquired by Evercoast in 2024. James currently serves as Principal Scientist, Architect at Adobe where he leads the realtime video engine development on Premiere Pro.

Scatter’s product Depthkit is the original and most widely used tool for creating volumetric video human holograms. First launched as an open source beta in 2011, Depthkit enabled tens of thousand users to create volumetric video. Today, Depthkit serves a vibrant community of global enterprises and creative artists alike. James is the primary inventor on Scatter’s patents granted by the USPTO that represent Depthkit’s foundational intellectual property for volumetric video technology.

He served as Executive Producer for Scatter’s virtual reality title Zero Days VR which won the first News & Documentary Emmy awarded to a 6DOF Virtual Reality experience. He was nominated for a second Emmy in 2022 for The Changing Same VR, for which he also acted as Executive Producer.

Prior to founding Scatter, James was the first Artist-in-Residence at Microsoft Research in Redmond. He co-directed CLOUDS, the first virtual reality documentary to utilize volumetric video for human holograms. CLOUDS premiered at Sundance New Frontier in 2014; won the Tribeca Storyscapes Award for Transmedia that year; then toured globally before its exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2016.

James coined the term ‘Volumetric Filmmaking’ in his 2016 essay A New Dimension in Filmmaking to distinguish the creative artform from the underlying volumetric video technology. Volumetric filmmaking has been adopted by artists around the globe, and recognized as an important emerging medium by the world’s most influential film festivals, arts organization and largest technology and media companies including Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Intel.

Immersive Media Credits

CLOUDS, Co-Director
Sundance New Frontier 2014, Tribeca Storyscapes Award for Transmedia 2014

Zero Days VR, Executive Producer and Technical Advisor
Emmy News & Documentary: Original Approaches 2017, Sundance New Frontier 2017

Blackout, Executive Producer and Technical Director
Tribeca Storyscapes 2017

The Changing Same, Executive Producer and Technical Advisor
Emmy-nominated News & Documentary: Oustanding Innovation 2021. Sundance New Frontier 2021, Tribeca Festival: Best immersive Narrative 2021.

Selected Press & Interviews

• James George on Creative New York - Museum of Modern Art

• Virtual Reality: The Wearable Movie - New Yorker Radio Hour, WNYC

• Tech As Art: Case Study - National Endowment for the Arts

• When Virtual Reality Competes with Reality - BBC Click

• Evercoast acquires Depthkit to advance GenAI for spatial video - Venture Beat

• James George Interview - XR Must

• Inventing Volumetric Filmmaking - Shaping Business Minds Through Art Podcast, The Artian

• Democratizing Volumetric Capture with Scatter’s Depthkit: The History, Evolution, & Future of Accessible Volumetric Filmmaking - Voices of VR

• Stuxnet Documentary ‘Zero Days VR’ Wins an Emmy - Road to VR

• Cracking the Narrative Code of VR with the Interactive Documentary Genre - Voices of VR

• The Groundbreaking Volumetric Filmmaking of Scatter - Filmmaker Magazine

• Computational Photography Is Ready For Its Close-Up - PC Magazine

• A Rikers Island Doctor Debuts At Tribeca Film Festival, With Help From This Artist-Led VR Company - Forbes

• What Only Artists Can Teach Us About Technology, Data, and Surveillance - The Stranger

• Is It Art? Artists Are Turning Their Work into Startups - Vice

• Inside Microsoft Research’s First Artist-in-Residence Program - Fast Company

• 5 Questions for Jonathan Minard and James George, Creators of The Tribeca Storyscapes Award Winning CLOUDS - PBS POV

• The Art of Creative Coding - PBS Off Book

• At Eyebeam, making art from the technology that tracks our every move - The Verge

Selected Writing & Lectures

• Expressing Our True Likeness in the Metaverse with Volumetric Video - Medium, Essay

• Brief History of Volumetric Filmmaking - Medium, Essay

• A New Dimension in Filmmaking - Medium, Essay

• Volumetric Filmmaking: Democratizing A New Medium - FirstMark's Hardwired, Lecture

• Imaging the Future - Eyeo Festival, Lecture

• CLOUDS Director’s Tour - Eyeo Festival, Lecture