Augmented Reality in Stockholm
Virtual Reality (VR) has been a subject of debate lately. Some think that VR is just a hype while others disagree. But everyone seems to agree that Augmented Reality (AR) has a bright future. Tim Cook famously said that AR will be much bigger than VR.
But AR and VR are very closely linked, especially from a funding perspective. According CB Insights AR/VR companies raised a record amounts in funding during 2016, more than double compared to the year before.
The highest funded AR/VR companies are Magic Leap ($1,4 billion), Unity (based in Copenhagen — $289 million) and Lytro ($150 million).
In Stockholm there is a lot of activity in the AR/VR space. I’ve previously written about Virtual Reality and listed a number of startups in A Guide to the VR Scene in Stockholm.
This time, let’s look at Augmented Reality startups:
Bublar
Bublar is a mobile experiences company founded in 2015. The company is launching its first product this fall, the next generation social app, integrating augmented reality and location into the social experience. The product revolves around content creation and content discovery using the camera and the map. Magnus Granqvist, CEO of Bublar, says in an interview that games is just one application area of their augmented reality technology, and that the company is looking at other verticals such as entertainment and consumer products. Bublar has raised funding from investors who have invested in other AR companies and is currently planning for an IPO.
13th Lab (acquired by Facebook)
13th Lab was an augmented reality startup in Stockholm that at the time was a leader in computer vision for mobile devices. The team built tools to enable the camera as a primary sensor. Their platform was based on technology originally invented by NASA that was used by autonomous vehicles on space missions. The company was acquired by Facebook in December 2014 , and we might be seeing 13th Lab technology in action today in Facebook’s AR and VR features.
DopplerGO
DopplerGO is a news and media platform that provides relevant, local news and activities in your immediate surroundings. The company gathers input from popular news sources and places them on a “smart map”. As a result you can follow news based on where they happened — like a digital, interactive local newspaper. The platform also has a game element similar to Pokémon Go called DopplerGames where anyone can create their own “treasure hunt” game based on augmented reality.
Flightradar24
Flightradar24 is the leading live flight tracker that shows air traffic in real time. The company started as a hobby project in 2006 and has grown to the largest network of flight receivers in the world with over 10,000 connected devices. Over 150,000 flights are tracked every day and the service has 1.5+ million daily active users. The Flightradar24 app has an innovative augmented reality feature where the user can point the phone/camera towards an airplane in the sky and get information about where the flight is flying to and from (see image above).
Igotcha
Igotcha is a game studio that is currently developing a location based game that has been described as a mix between Pokémon Go and Monopoly. Since the game hasn’t been released yet there aren’t any public images or screenshots (to my knowledge). So we don’t know for sure if the game has elements of AR. But the comparison to Pokémon Go is interesting, and has also made the company attractive to investors. The founder, Susanne Birgersdotter, says in an interview with DI Digital that the success of Pokémon Go has led to an increased in interest in her company. The company has raised about $1 million in funding and the first game is set to be released in 2017.
Wec360
wec360° is one of Swedens leading 3D-visualization companies. They offer visualisation services in VR, AR, 3D models, video, still images and much more — primarily to the real estate market. The company has a partnership with Samsung to provide VR experiences for home buyers. There are even features that allow you as a prospective buyer to change interior color and add custom furniture to get the full experience of what your future home might look like. wec360° has also worked with several cities in Sweden — including Stockholm — to visualise infrastructure and real estate projects in augmented reality.
Booli (feature)
Booli is one of Sweden’s largest platforms for home buyers. The company was early with augmented reality when they created a feature to find homes for sale in your surrounding. The app had a feature that overlaid homes for sale and their relative distance to your location. Although the feature is not available in the app anymore, it’s a interesting example of how AR can be used and how early startups i Stockholm started applying the technology.
City of Stockholm
The City of Stockholm has been using AR a long time to visualise infrastructure and real estate projects. I took the picture above in 2012 which shows Friends Arena years before it was completed. Today, the city applies AR on a wide range of projects including city planning and in public spaces.
The purpose of this article is to highlight startups in Stockholm. At Invest Stockholm, they work with international investors, corporates, talent and journalist who are interested in the Stockholm startup scene. Read more at www.investstockholm.com.
You can find more articles about Stockholm based startups on my Medium page here.
