Real2U and the path from Augmented Reality to the 3D industry
When Real2U was founded in 2016, we believed Augmented Reality was going to reshape the way people interact with the world. The potential was endless and AR goggles were booming back then, as Microsoft had just released HoloLens, Apple was rumored to be developing iPhone-backed glasses, and Magic Leap was still a big promise in the startup community.
The Beginning of the journey
When we received the invitation for the second wave of the HoloLens closed beta, we purchased a pair of the developer kit and started tinkering with the technology. From a developer standpoint, creating AR applications was much harder than just plugging the HoloToolkit in and waiting for the magic to happen. Much like in the early days of the mobile industry, the first versions of the SDKs were filled with bugs that would crash the operating system while you tried to reproduce the very basic getting started tutorials online. Worse than that, we would post a question on the Microsoft forums and wait days for a response from fellow programmers. In addition to software challenges, the hardware limitations made it almost impossible to create any production applications, so we had to develop creative solutions to optimize our 3D content and our generated build.
We soon learned that exploring cutting edge technologies were though.
In the end, we needed paying customers…
Besides having to overcome the technical challenges of AR, we still needed to prove that users and companies were willing to pay for any of our applications. The real estate industry, as it turned out, was the first to show some acceptance to this new technology. We began with a couple of projects and soon we became the leading company in Brazil to create augmented reality experiences with architectural models and interiors using HoloLens.
The nemesis
Even though our first projects were a huge success, we ran into a problem much bigger than the ones we faced in terms of user experience, software, or hardware limitations. Since companies needed to rent expensive, hard to find HoloLens headsets to run their marketing campaigns, the distribution of our apps was too limited, so we couldn't scale up our business and were restricted to selling only a few projects per month.
A new era emerges: mobile AR
It wasn't until 2018 that the augmented reality industry saw another breakthrough that tackled this issue. When Apple's ARKit came out (and later Google's ARCore), every single user with a good enough mobile phone could download AR applications directly from home, without having to purchase or try a new gadget on. Better yet, the functionalities of these new SDKs were much better than what developers could previously do with tracking images (or QR codes) such as with Vuforia. Now, the sensors and camera on your phone were good enough to detect the real world and position objects on a fixed scale, translation, and rotation.
We began exploring the possibilities of this new tech and started developing AR mobile apps. We chose Unity as our development platform due to its huge community and good support, and after some experimentations, we eventually started offering "AR as a service" for furniture and appliance retailers (inspired by IKEA Place).
Similar to what we had experienced with Microsoft's headset, to help cope with hardware and software limitations, ARKit and ARCore posed many restrictions in terms of the number of polygons, textures, and file size to our 3D content. Since we had to optimize and standardize the exported models, we developed a custom build pipeline to do that in scale, eventually being able to create thousands of models per day, in comparison to only a handful when we started. We created a strict checklist for both manual and automated testing that would validate 3D products as "AR ready", and started applying that both internally and to the models we received.
Does it scale?
For a while, it was all good and working, but we soon ran into our old nemesis: the distribution problem. While mobile apps could theoretically be downloaded by anyone, in practice you needed to market them and pay for the user acquisition, which made the costs of any project skyrocket.
Apple and Google once again saved the day by releasing AR Quick Look and Scene Viewer in 2019, the plug and play augmented reality SDKs for the web. Instead of downloading a program from the app store, you could see any 3D objects directly on the browser. This innovation greatly reduced user friction and allowed us to increase the reach of our services. We still had to optimize and standardize our 3D models, but it was much easier to put them into action.
Present times
Fast forward to 2020 and we are still on the mission of helping retailers and manufacturers create better visual experiences of their online stores through digital created content.
We decided that augmented reality is just one of the many ways our world can be enhanced and explored. Together with computer-generated imagery, such as silo shots and set scenes, users can have a better feel of what they are trying to purchase and make better decisions.
We believe the future is digital, and soon enough we will have more and more applications of the virtual world in the real world. Players with a vast experience in 3D modeling, texturing, optimization and rendering will have a huge advantage in that scenario, so we prepare ourselves by creating the building blocks and tools for any 3D-focused application or industry. In any case, we still think we are just in the beginning.
