Another High-Flying, Heavily Funded AR Startup Is Shutting Down (techcrunch.com) 24
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Daqri, which built enterprise-grade AR headsets, has shuttered its HQ, laid off many of its employees and is selling off assets ahead of a shutdown, former employees and sources close to the company tell TechCrunch. In an email obtained by TechCrunch, the nearly 10-year-old company told its customers that it was pursuing an asset sale and was shutting down its cloud and smart-glasses hardware platforms by the end of September.
Daqri faced substantial challenges from competing headset makers, including Magic Leap and Microsoft, which were backed by more expansive war chests and institutional partnerships. While the headset company struggled to compete for enterprise customers, Daqri benefited from investor excitement surrounding the broader space. That is, until the investment climate for AR startups cooled. Daqri was, at one point, speaking with a large private-equity firm about financing ahead of a potential IPO, but as the technical realities facing other AR companies came to light, the firm backed out and the deal crumbled, we are told. The report notes that Osterhout Design Group and Meta, an AR headset startup that raised $73 million from VCs, both sold their assets earlier this year.
Daqri faced substantial challenges from competing headset makers, including Magic Leap and Microsoft, which were backed by more expansive war chests and institutional partnerships. While the headset company struggled to compete for enterprise customers, Daqri benefited from investor excitement surrounding the broader space. That is, until the investment climate for AR startups cooled. Daqri was, at one point, speaking with a large private-equity firm about financing ahead of a potential IPO, but as the technical realities facing other AR companies came to light, the firm backed out and the deal crumbled, we are told. The report notes that Osterhout Design Group and Meta, an AR headset startup that raised $73 million from VCs, both sold their assets earlier this year.
"enterprise-grade AR headsets" (Score:2)
Wtf is an "enterprise-grade" AR headset? Does that mean it can handle sitting around the office all day?
Re: "enterprise-grade AR headsets" (Score:2)
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Hardware slowly advances. Alternative interfaces get tried again and again. Ideas get dug out from the trash heap of history and given a good airing...
And nothing much changes until a killer app comes around.
Visicalc. The first WYSIWYG word processor (was it WordPerfect?) Mosilla.
And all of a sudden, the hardware, which has been ready for a while, and an idea that has been in SciFi literature for decades made huge strides forward.
Re: "enterprise-grade AR headsets" (Score:2)
The first WYSIWYG word processor (was it WordPerfect?)
Uh...Bravo?
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Mosaic, not Mozilla.
Also, Bravo was hardly a killer app, nor were its immediate successors. It was LisaWrite and MacWrite that, I think, really got WYSIWYG word processing going. Wordperfect came much later.
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I see far more day-to-day usability in AR than VR. Imagine a functional HUD with all of the relevant status updates of your current surroundings, including the ability to overlay diagrams & directions over real-world objects.
Good AR has tons of use cases. The problem is that "good" AR is far harder than VR, and the technology to make it easily useable in day-to-day situations doesn't exist yet.
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Google Glass was catching on pretty quickly at one point... even though we all hated it, Google moved it to enterprise rather than consumer because there were too many problems with things like ethics (Glass in the showers?)
Forget AR... it's interesting, but in reality what AR is really good at is games and heads up displays.
I've always enjoyed playing with the tech, but frankly, it wasn't until Microsoft made it poss
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Another false dawn for VR and AR (Score:1)
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Heavily funded? (Score:2)
You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.
Re: Heavily funded? (Score:2)
AR has multiple meanings as well. This one was the less interesting one.
Re: Heavily funded? (Score:2)
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They were fucked (Score:2)
I know somebody who worked there but got out ahead of the collapse. They were completely fucked by incompetent management who had no idea what they were doing. They had entire divisions who did not know each other even existed within the company. A factory producing kit that the software developers had never seen. Fucking incompetent chaos.
Dead or alive you are coming with me. (Score:2)
Their first gen one had a definite Robocop vibe.
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
Why are all these AR glasses designed badly? (Score:2)
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Are those actual AR glasses or an unregistered heads up display. I couldn't find anything about the motion to photon latency, which is the key figure of merit for see through AR displays. It also looks like it has only one camera, so it's not going to do decent tracking of the real world compared to the hololens (which has 4 wide angle world tracking cameras).
If you're doing world registered AR (i.e. actual AR) then FoV really REALLY REALLY matters, because otherwise it's like looking through a letterbox, a
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