New AREA member Arvizio is in the news recently, having just released version 4.0 of its MR Studio platform. The Ottawa-based company is led by CEO Jonathan Reeves, who has founded several successful startups, including Mangrove Systems, Sirocco Systems, and Sahara Networks, as well as serving as an Operating Partner of Bessemer Venture Partners and Chairman of CloudLink.

AREA: Jonathan, you’ve had an impressive track record as a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist. You’ve been involved in a variety of companies and other areas of IT. What motivated you back in 2016 to say, “Now is the right time for me to get into the Mixed Reality business”?

JONATHAN REEVES: That’s a great question.
As you noted, I have started a number of companies over the years. When
considering a new venture, I always tend to look at where the markets are going
and which areas of technology look the most interesting, the most challenging,
or where I think there is an opportunity for innovation. It became apparent to
me and the other founders of Arvizio that Augmented and Mixed Reality
technology were getting close to a point of inflection where the market would
develop quite rapidly in a timeframe that suited us. That is, we are trying to
extrapolate where we think the market will be a couple of years ahead when you
start a technology company. Of course, things change along the way as the
market develops and the dynamics become clear. We felt the combination of
technologies, such as Microsoft HoloLens, the recently introduced Magic Leap and
the evolution of ARCore from Google and ARKit from Apple, indicated a general
movement towards immersive technology and the timing was interesting from an
enterprise perspective. What we didn’t know at the time was just how rapidly 5G
technology was going to enter into the mix. We are finding this to be an
accelerant to the market. So, we’re rather pleased with the way the market is developing.

OBMOČJE:
For our readers who are not familiar with Arvizio, can you tell us what
distinguishes your company from its competitors?

JONATHAN REEVES: We believe there are several
key AR challenges for the enterprise, particularly in the area of handling very
large 3D models and point clouds – the type of data that’s often used in
industries such as architecture, engineering, construction, energy, automotive and
so forth. The 3D models that are used in these industries are much larger than
the local rendering capability of most devices. We felt that addressing that
problem would be of great interest – that is, the ability to take full-scale CAD
models, BIM models using tools like Revit, Navisworks or using LiDAR scans, for
example, and then bringing this data into Augmented and Mixed Reality
experiences. We do not believe this has been well served in the market and
something we feel presents a significant point of differentiation for us.

OBMOČJE:
Do you plan to continue focusing exclusively on AEC, engineering, energy, and
other large-scale enterprises?

JONATHAN REEVES: That has been our
initial focus, but what we’re finding is there are other industries that also
have similar problems. Specific types of manufacturing companies such as
automotive, shipbuilding, and so forth have similar challenges because they’re also
working with immense models. While we began with a focus in the aforementioned
sectors, we are also finding the technology we’ve developed has relevance across
industrije.

OBMOČJE:
Without naming any names, can you tell us about some of your customers and what
they’re doing with MR Studio?

JONATHAN REEVES: A large, multinational
top-10 AEC firm uses our platform extensively for visualization experiences in
the presales or project pursuit phase. When a new building is to be visualized
with a customer, they historically worked with Virtual Reality technology. But
the downsides of VR are quite well understood. It’s not suitable for everybody,
some people have motion sickness issues and it tends to be an insular, single
person experience. We believe there are significant benefits for AR and Mixed Reality
in the area of collaboration. They may wish to do a guided tour, as it were, of
a new project, showing a customer or our customer’s customer how it’s going to
appear, overlaid on the real world. We give them the ability to collaborate,
share the experience with multiple users participating in the session, overlay
the models on the real world and bring Mixed Reality and Augmented Reality’s
benefits to the fore. In these scenarios, you may be doing immersive walk-throughs
and design reviews, looking at features before they’re built – or in brownfield
scenarios, overlaying renovations and enhancements onto an existing physical
space. These are a few examples of what our customers are doing with the
platforma.

OBMOČJE:
It’s impressive how built-out and robust your platform is for a company that’s
only three years old. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the more
significant capabilities you’ve been adding recently and how they benefit
kupci?

JONATHAN REEVES: Absolutely. We are in
the process of releasing our 4.0 version of the platform. One of the key features
of that release is hybrid rendering. That’s the ability to split the rendering
between on-device – a HoloLens, Magic Leap or mobile device – and a backend
GPU-based server, where we run our MR Studio Director platform. This
essentially allows you to enter a high-definition mode. For instance, if you’re
looking at a mobile device in a tabletop format in a conference room or onsite
and you want to get a much higher level of detail associated with the model, you
can enter hybrid mode and stream the results to the mobile device from a remote
server. This allows you to get a 50 to 100x increase in the available
resolution of the model that you’re going to render. Imagine you’re doing a
walk-through of a building or visualizing a particular piece of complex machinery
and then, you want a really high level of detail on a particular area. You can now
achieve that in a seamless fashion.

This is actually being tested by a
number of service providers as we speak. There’s a lot of interest in this mode
of operation, running over 5G networks. Service providers such as Verizon,
AT&T and Deutsche Telecom are working with us to test these capabilities
and validate their operation over both existing LTE and future 5G networks.

In this scenario, latency become
important. The ability to render models at high speed and the level of detail
that you can achieve becomes significant. For example, point clouds, as used by
many industries from LiDAR scanners or used in photogrammetry as a source data,
can be hundreds of millions, or even billions of points. Typically, mobile
device processors such as used in HoloLens or Magic Leap, on a tablet or mobile
phone, are only able to render a few million points on the device. There’s an
order of magnitude discrepancy between what can be handled on-device and the
size of the model to be rendered. In this case, we use high-performance GPUs running
on edge compute servers or in the cloud to render the high-resolution model and
then stream that into the mobile device. This is a key new feature that we
showed recently at the Augmented World Expo Show.

OBMOČJE:
We spoke with Brian Vogelsang from Qualcomm a few weeks back and he was
pointing out that same idea – that as we look to the future of AR technology,
we will see more development activity devoted to dividing the computing burden
between the device and computers at the network edge, figuring out where the
work can best be done to deliver the best, fastest visualization and experience
za uporabnika.

JONATHAN REEVES: I think it’s an
absolutely critical point and Brian is a good friend of ours. Qualcomm featured
our software running on a combination of their 5G handset reference design and
the glasses from nreal at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a few months ago
and we will also be part of their exhibit at the Enterprise Wearables
Technology Summit in September. The ability to bring this kind of enterprise-class
rendering and large model handling to these new 5G equipped headsets is of
particular interest. The 5G work with Qualcomm and telecom providers is an
important development in Augmented and Mixed Reality because this begins to
shape the types of wireless connectivity that the headsets themselves will
zagotoviti.

OBMOČJE:
What is your sense of the state of Augmented Reality adoption and the pace of
momentum behind it?

JONATHAN REEVES: I think that’s an
interesting question that many in the industry are pondering. Several key
things have happened in the last 12 months. First of all, the widespread
adoption of ARKit and ARCore in mobile handsets has really opened the eyes of
many to the benefits of Augmented Reality. We’re at a pivotal point.

Secondly, AR glasses are going through
generational changes so we think it is important to have a cross-platform
strategy. In discussing our solution with customers, they often tell us they’re
not going to select just one platform and stick with it. It is an evolving
market and we believe it is essential that users have a common or familiar
experience when using a phone, a tablet, a HoloLens, a Magic Leap or new emerging
glasses, like the nreal; this has been an important part of our strategy and we
think this is extremely important for the evolution of the market.

We are also seeing some real changes
there in terms of the tools that vendors like Unity are offering. Their AR Foundation
is particularly helpful because it allows you to build a single application
that can run on both ARKit and ARCore, for example. A lot of effort is spent to
ensure the application we serve can be supported on multiple devices. In
addition to that, we also believe that the arrival of Magic Leap in the market
and the HoloLens 2 represent a new generation of technology with more
capabilities. The spatial mapping is significantly more powerful than before.
And we think these developments put the market at somewhat of a tipping point, where
during the second half of 2019 and into 2020, we will see a rapid acceleration.
I believe this is being demonstrated in the market as we speak.

OBMOČJE:
Why did you join the AREA and what do you hope to gain through your membership? JONATHAN REEVES: We actually had been monitoring the AREA
over the last couple years and watching the evolution of the organization with
interest. We have seen an increasing number of partners that we’re working with
joining the AREA and customers or prospective customers that are also joining. We
felt this was a good time to join. And I must say, we’ve been very excited
about the level of exposure it has already given us and we’re very pleased and
excited to be part of it.

Source: https://thearea.org/arvizios-jonathan-reeves-on-large-scale-ar/