INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
While nearly every tech giant has publicly proclaimed augmented reality the next frontier to conquer, product movement has been relatively
slow as the companies& aim to nail very base issues in consumer-friendly ways has proven difficult.
Ubiquity6 is one of a handful of
startups aiming to tackle the backlog of backend features currently missing from most AR experiences available today
The fast-growing company is looking to build tools that will essentially enable users to create a cloud-based AR copy of the physical world
and enable persistent, dynamic multiplayer AR experiences as a result.
Today, the startup announced that it has closed a $27 million Series
Bled by Benchmark and Index Ventures
The company has raised over $37 million to date with plenty of high-profile VC firms amongst its investor list including Google Gradient
Ventures, First Round, and KPCB — where Ubiquity6 CEO Anjney Midha previously helped run a small fund
With this raise,Benchmark GP Mitch Lasky will be joining the Ubiquity6 board.
Multiplayer AR toolsets have been a trend of the year as
Google, Apple and a host of other startups have looked to focus on how two or more users can sync their maps of the world in the most
A big focus of the Ubiquity6 efforts have been on building 3D mesh maps of entire public areas so that that the onboarding process just
naturally grows to be instantaneous.
This strategy works great for museums and much less well for your living room, but Ubiquity6 is
hoping that the experiences available in their app can have episodic utility that ties them closely with events at public geographic
locations.
In more ways than one, the startup seems to be taking a page from Snapchat in their approach to AR but also hopes to leapfrog
Snap efforts by moving harder and faster into the hard AR tech that the chat app has largely sidestepped
The company app, which has yet to launch, has a bit of a carousel-like app selector which can boot up separate AR experiences much like one
would switch through Snapchat Lenses.
I had a chance to demo some of the startup technology earlier this month and while phone-based AR
still generally has a host of usability challenges, Ubiquity6 was able to deliver some interesting scenes that were optimized to be used by
up to 100 users concurrently
My demo of adding cubes to an ever-expanding digital art sculpture was certainly simplistic but had a notable lack of hiccups through the
entire process.
The company partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was previewed earlier this month with an activation
inside the Magritte exhibit
The experience takes some familiar themes from the artist and allows phone-wilding visitors to step through AR portals and explore the
&inner-workings& of the paintings
It an intriguing concept that seems particularly well-suited for the surrealist artist.
The company app hasn''t launched at a grand scale
yet though people interested in testing out a beta of the startup tech can sign-up on the their website.
