Wow! How great was yesterday’s Demo Day? It was a real highlight of our mixed reality (XR) program that we started last summer with Nreal. A huge thank you goes to my colleagues Tim Akgül and Sven von Aschwege for organizing and also to all the mentors that supported the program.
Thirteen start-ups from all over the world demonstrated how XR can improve user experience when it comes to gaming, sport, entertainment, and even business. Thirteen presentations that illustrated the potential when the real and virtual worlds come together. And the interest generated by this topic was immense: around 500 participants dialed into the virtual Demo Day and enjoyed an inspiring morning.
By the way, we will be continuing the program this year and are on the look out for more ideas from fields such as gaming, education, collaboration, journalism 2.0, healthcare, and customer service. Interested start-ups or developers can find all information about the new program here. You can register until XX.XX.
But back to the present. What were the participants able to see? Here an admittedly very subjective selection:
Augmented reality for city tours or events
The platform created by the Australian team TagSpace allows users to show brief texts, images, and even videos in other people’s virtual experience. Options include information about the place where the user is currently located. For example, the user can view the menu of the restaurant they are currently stood in front of. Or even information about the exhibition in the museum around the corner. This platform can be used to accompany entire virtual tours. And this is something that is really practical for cities, tourism, and events. By the way, the team convinced us so much that we invested in them via our hubraum fund.
Video conference 2.0
Even though video conferences are already an excellent alternative to face-to-face meetings, they aren't really much fun yet. The Slovakian start-up MATSUKO INTERACTIVE wants to change this! Their application turns us into holograms in virtual rooms and almost makes us believe that we are actually sitting next to each other. Anyone who has seen the film Kingsman will know what I’m talking about. Science fiction is becoming reality here. That’s not all: it’s not even necessary to have lots of cameras in a room that record people from all four sides or a high-performance computer that transforms them into a three-dimensional stream. The start-up’s platform generates the holograms using only the images from an iPhone camera. Simply amazing!
The TV experience of tomorrow
The solution of German start-up Eyecandylab allows information about the TV program or stream to be shown in our living rooms. During soccer games, statistics about distances covered, goal chances, or a particular player are shown to me through the mixed reality glasses. If I am watching a series and I happen to like a particular handbag, I can take a look at it in 3D in my own living room and, via a simple click on the “learn more” button, I can either purchase it or learn about the hotel in which the filming for the series took place. This product is full of music and various applications.
Augmented reality brings childrens’ books to life
The Israeli start-up Inception XR already has a great deal of experience in the field of virtual reality. In the hubraum program, they presented their Bookful app through the Nreal Light glasses. This device brings the figures in childrens’ books to life. For example, sleeping beauty appears right in front of the childrens’ eyes as a 3D animation, ensuring lots of fun in childrens’ rooms Books can be enjoyed in a playful manner, developing a child’s desire to read.
Meditation and relaxation
The American start-up TRIPP have approached a very different topic. They have successfully devoted themselves to the field of meditation and relaxation. Based on scientific methods, their app offers the most varied breathing and relaxation methods. Users have confirmed that their well-being has improved by 25 percent after their “Tripp”. So it’s not surprising that the app has already received several awards including the “Lumiére Award 2019 for Health & Well Being”.
If we have aroused your interest and you would also now like to dive into virtual worlds, then you should be aware that Deutsche Telekom started its advance sale of the Nreal Light on March 17. Further information is available here. (German only).
We are looking forward to the future.
Axel Menneking
