When Facebook bought Oculus Rift back in March, Hollywood took notice. Though accelerated development of the virtual-reality headset will be largely driven by video games, the idea of strapping immersive movies or TV shows to your head suddenly seemed inevitable.

But creating gaming content for VR looks easy compared with the challenge of capturing the real world for viewing through the mask. How do you block your actors? Should the camera move?

SEE ALSO: The Virtual Reality Renaissance Is Here, But Are We Ready?

And what kind of camera would you even shoot on in the first place?

Palo Alto-based startup Jaunt has been quietly building just such a platform, which it hopes it can deliver to virtual reality headsets not just immersive cinematic-style narrative content, but live events as well. With a new $6.8 million capital raise, a full working demo and meetings scheduled all over Los Angeles, the company — which has been toiling for months in "stealth" mode — has de-cloaked and is ready to mingle.

What they have now is a spiky disco ball-like cluster of several synched cameras that shoot all around, paired with software suite that stitches it all together, adjusting depth after the fact for a 3D effect. It takes about 10 times as long to render the footage as it does to shoot it, so the goal of a smooth, real-time broadcast to a VR headset is a ways off yet. But they’re getting there.

Jaunt CEO Jens Christensen and his team are taking meetings with studios, agencies, directors and producers — no one’s allowed to name names just yet, but watch this space — and they’re open to ideas. Jaunt isn’t in it to make the content; the focus is hardware and software.

That didn’t stop the company from giving it a shot, at least for demo purposes. Jaunt gave Mashable an exclusive look Monday, and when I slipped on my mask and headphones, I most definitely wasn’t in Starbucks anymore.

Instead, I was standing at the bottom of an amoeba pool in a large skatepark, watching a BMX biker ride all around me. I could follow him, or just stare up at the walls, the sky, look behind me — anywhere. The only intrusion to any part of my periphery was a small disc where my feet would otherwise be.

Another demo was the set of a sci-fi horror thriller (think The Thing remake with terrible acting and even worse special effects). The surround-sound in my headphones, captured by Jaunt’s directional microphone (visible to the left of another prototype, below), cued me where to look: a wounded man trapped against metal stairs is straight ahead. A woman runs up on my right and starts shouting and points at a third man, who’s losing a battle with a leggy insectoid monster on my left.

Another type of Jaunt's prototype 360-degree camera.

It’s a convincing experience, one that will only get better when Oculus Rift releases its next-generation headset to developers this summer, with higher resolution and smoother motion. That’s a good thing, too, because the current version is prone to blur and graininess.

It’s easy to imagine how a James Cameron or Martin Scorsese would want the chance to noodle on it. We are, after all, witnessing not the extension of a medium, but the genesis of an altogether new one. And as with any new medium, it faces daunting technical and creative challenges.

For one thing, digitally rendered environments can be explored at will, whereas when shooting live action, the viewer will always be at the mercy of wherever the camera is positioned. And moving the camera around is not a good user experience — yet — so the position of each shot is fixed, at least for now.

But there’s enough potential here that the company is backed by several entities including Redpoint Ventures and British Sky Broadcasting. And what little competition is out there is focused on creating content by cobbling together existing technology, such as Red cameras arranged in a circle, which doesn't allow for a full 360-degree experience.

"A lot of companies are being funded now in the VR spaces, lots getting funding soon," Brenden Iribe, cofounder and CEO of Oculus Rift, told Mashable. "Before there was lots of venture funding being poured into mobile, all the different software, the same will happen in VR. So you'll definitely see things like 360 cameras. All these complimentary hardware devices that show up with VR, possibly much more than we saw with mobile, because you interact with the world in so many ways."

Right now for Jaunt, the sky — as well as the ground, and everything around you — is the limit.

“Bringing virtual reality to the wide entertainment market is a daunting proposition, but I believe the team that Jaunt has assembled is capable of doing exactly that, and doing it in a way that will make your jaw drop when you experience it,” said Redpoint partner Tim Haley. “The virtual reality market is just beginning to pick up speed but you can already see how seriously people are taking it and the potential it really has.”

At this point, you can’t just buy a Jaunt camera and software suite to use on your own; to work with the Jaunt tech is to work with the company, whose production and postproduction protocols sound like they're a short step down from astrophysics.

Speaking of, how cool would it be to put a Jaunt camera on the next Mars rover? Maybe the team should be taking a meeting up at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena next.

BONUS: How Does Virtual Reality Work?