Laying the foundation to build a 3D map of the world
We’re all extremely excited to announce our cooperation with Qualcomm Technologies and Nreal, the launch of Android support (with HMDs and bit-compatible IOS interoperability), and roll out our pricing & business model. These are the first (of many!) steps we are taking toward building this 3D map of the world.
Today represents a milestone in our journey as a company, with a big traction announcement in conjunction with Qualcomm, Nreal and Deutsche Telekom, a big product announcement regarding cross-platform support for Android and iOS (and HMDs), and announcing our business model & pricing to enable our customers to ship their apps with confidence around their costs.
6D was founded to deliver the next platform of computing — the 3D maps of the world, usable by machines and people…. the mirrorworld. This 3D model of the world is what all apps will run on, being readable via APIs for developers to help solve key UX problems for their next-gen apps. We are seeing this happen today with businesses of all sizes across a variety of industries looking to build spatially aware applications that go beyond AR to scanning, location-based services and in the future, drones and robotics. This technology shift brings solutions for advanced AR Cloud apps, visual localization in spaces inaccessible by GPS, and consumer 3D scanning at scale. 6D’s technical breakthroughs do in software on a phone, what previously required dedicated hardware (and people). This means that the mirrorworld, the next platform, is closer than we imagine.
We’re often surprised that 6D has such a high profile in the AR industry, for such a small & young company (15 people, seed funded). Many of the experts in AR understand how a map of the world gets built from on-device computer vision tech on phones. But the rest of us also need to see simple use-cases, and how they will scale out. Today’s announcement addresses that question head on, with Deutsch Telekom, Nreal & Qualcomm coming together to solve one of the most compelling AR use-cases around remote support for field service engineers, but for the first time using low cost hardware.
Enterprises have been the earliest adopters of AR, seeing clear ROI in simplifying work processes. Remote field support has been one of the first use-cases to be deployed. However to deliver these use-cases has meant using expensive all-in-1 headsets. We are working to change that for the first time by teaming up with Qualcomm and Nreal to enable a fully spatially mapped field-service application for DT, while only needing a phone and low cost lightweight glasses. This UX is possible because of 6D’s software based approach, and 6D will be a default part of Qualcomm’s solution, offered to all HMD OEMs when they choose Qualcomm’s leading XR chips.
This is the first step that 6D is taking to deliver on a key use-case, and doing it at scale.
In conjunction with this specific Qualcomm announcement, we’re excited to share that several other large developers are working on great applications with killer use-cases. While they aren’t ready to launch yet, companies like Autodesk, Nexus Studios, Accenture and several other Fortune 500 enterprises are all using 6D to develop solutions to their business problems.
Another key pillar of 6D’s vision, is that we are the cross-platform solution. Before today we only supported iOS handheld devices, but with today’s announcement with Qualcomm we are supporting lightweight HMDs, and also (finally) Android! This has been a major request from developers for the past year, and our beta is open and we will be making our system available to developers today. Like iOS, we are rolling Android out in limited numbers for the next few weeks, then rapidly make it available to all developers. Sign up and share your ideas and device type and we’ll get you on board asap. The magic of our Android release is that the output of our neural networks and SLAM systems are bit-compatible with IOS, meaning that any 3D maps or meshes created on iOS can be consumed on Android & vice-versa. As we are pushing the limits of Vulcan and MLKit it means that we expect to support nearly all ARCore devices back to Snapdragon 845 and newer! There’s no one else who can do this today :)
For iOS users we’re also providing a sneak peek at our live texturing tech, via a sample app, which will gradually expand into a full crowd-sourced mapping solution, but you can start trying it out now (well, when Apple approves the TestFlight build…still waiting, we’ll post links when we get them).
Finally, the other question we receive almost daily from developers is “how much does this cost, and how can I pay you?” (yes really :). We’re publishing our low-cost pricing today, so you can forecast with confidence. Our pricing reflects a core value of 6D, which is that we are not creating incentives to monetize data in ways that aren’t providing value to our customers (ie our users aren’t the product, they are our customers). We are building a business where we provide value and our customers pay a fair price for what we provide. We believe this is the right way to build a long-lasting, trusted, infrastructure service, similar to companies like Amazon Web Services or Stripe.
As a thank you and incentive to those developers who have been testing our solution for the last year, we want to offer 3 years of free service of the current APIs for any applications that are launched publicly before the end of 2019. So if you have any partially built projects (or new ideas to try out), this is the time to finish them off and get them launched.
This series of business and product updates are laying the foundation for our vision to power the way we understand the world.
If you are interested in starting to test 6D, you can gain access to our APIs at www.6d.ai and if you have a larger project you’d like to get some advice on partnering more deeply with us, then please email sales@6d.ai
