Announcing 6D.ai + Shasta Camera Fund — Building the AR Cloud to enable the digital world around us
6D.ai is the augmented reality platform that brings the detail of persistence and shared interactions to life, and at Shasta we are thrilled to be investing with the team and product we think can drive the entire AR world forward.
For the promise of augmented reality to come to fruition we are going to need more than surface tracking and digital overlay. We need an intelligence of location and direction, lighting and shade, persistence of an object that exists beyond a user session, and the ability to have a shared experience with a digital object that interacts within the physical world.
All of these demands are solved by the concept of an AR Cloud, a common 3D map of the digital world that overlays directly on our existing world. This common map will enable digital objects and assets to exist in perpetuity, beyond a user session, and exist to be shared and experienced among multiple people at the same time or into the future.
Matt Miesnieks, Victor Prisacariu and the 6D.ai team bring a wealth of AR and computer vision experience to bear. Matt is one of the smartest and deepest thinkers in AR I have ever met. (If you haven’t read his blogs on AR, do it now.) Matt has been building AR platforms for nearly a decade with Dekko, at Samsung, and at Super Ventures. And Victor Prisacariu is bringing his distinguished research career in computer vision at Oxford, and apparent fanboy status by Tim Cook. (To be clear: Tim Cook is the fanboy of Victor).
In Matt’s words, in his “Introducing 6D.ai and Our Master Plan,”
“The 6D.ai API generates a 3D mesh of the world where AR content assets are persistent, responsive to occlusion, and efficiently synced between multiple users to help developers create engaging, useful and exciting apps that truly interact with the physical world. For example, instead of an object limited to a tabletop indoors, characters can interact with the outside world by hiding behind a city building and popping out for someone or sitting at a bus stop and moving into the map when someone needs travel information. Since they can be seen by multiple phones at the same time, people could surround characters and catch them together as a group. With these new features, digital content starts to behave as if it is really part of the three-dimensional real world.”
We at Shasta Ventures are thrilled to invest in and partner with the 6D.ai team as a part of our Shasta Camera Fund and we look forward to a bright future of high quality, persistent and shared experiences in augmented reality.
For a little fun, here is the video of Matt Miesnieks speaking at VR Tuesday #11 on July 18, 2017. If you look closely you can see the glint of 6D.ai in his eye…
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A little more about me: I invest in computer vision, augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics, space, blockchain and cryptocurrency at Shasta Ventures. I lead the Shasta Camera Fund initiative and I’m on twitter @jacob. If you’re working on something interesting in these areas I’d love to connect.
