Super Ventures presents the ecosystem of companies dedicated to augmented reality and six of the key areas in which to invest.
The augmented reality startup incubator, Super Ventures, has published the ecosystem of companies dedicated to augmented reality composed of 312 companies that they have selected, one of them being the Spanish company Olorama based in Valencia that appears in the olfaction category in output. The ecosystem is composed of six main categories: applications, tools, devices, input, output and components, and these in turn are divided into more subcategories to try to collect the current panorama after this first quarter of 2017.
The key areas to be developed and in which Super Ventures advises investing are the following:
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For Tom Emrich, founding partner of Super Ventures, the holy grail of AR is that the graphic information displayed is indistinguishable from natural vision, and to achieve this, advances in light fields, retinal projection, photorealistic rendering, natural vergence and focus adjustment and comfort will be necessary. Vision challenges will also require solutions for autonomy, connectivity, multisensory fusion, tactile perception and sound.
Natural input and output and interaction
Augmented reality goes beyond sight, “we perceive this reality with all our senses, from sound to touch and even with emotional reactions,” says Emrich. New inputs such as eye tracking, gesture and voice recognition, will manage to take the technology towards new ways of interacting with the augmented world. In turn, touch, audio and emotional solutions will be required for the virtual feeling to be immersive.
Identify the real world in 3D
Moving from 2D to 3D requires solutions that are capable of scanning, capturing, positioning and recognizing the 3D world. “Scanning and positioning places, objects and people represents a challenge, especially on a large scale,” says Emrich. Giving devices the ability to not only see the world around them but to make sense of it, will be a critical part with great opportunities.
Building the world
“With devices recognizing and positioning the real world, developers and designers will have to customize, shape and augment it with a virtual layer. In short, to create a metaverse,” says Emrich. This will require tools that allow you to easily capture and modify real-world content, as well as create new content intuitively. Quality management, optimization and workflow for developers are also some of the opportunities that are presented.
Telepresence
“Every new innovation follows a similar pattern to the last one, so if we take the mobile and web era as a reference, we can expect that one of the killer AR apps will be communication and collaboration,” says Emrich. Large-scale social experiences and communicating with other people as if they were in the same room are some of the opportunities that arise.
Super intelligence
“Technology has always been able to improve our capabilities and AR will take this to the extreme,” says Emrich. Having this class of devices in our field of vision, new employees can become professionals from day one, and all global knowledge can be at our fingertips without the need to be in front of a traditional screen. The business sector will benefit greatly from this, so solutions that allow knowledge to be shared and that are useful in a specific vertical such as construction represent great investment opportunities.
