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Another High-Flying, Heavily Funded AR Startup Is Shutting Down (techcrunch.com) 24

Posted by BeauHD from the failed-to-gain-momentum dept.
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.
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Another High-Flying, Heavily Funded AR Startup Is Shutting Down More

Another High-Flying, Heavily Funded AR Startup Is Shutting Down

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  • Wtf is an "enterprise-grade" AR headset? Does that mean it can handle sitting around the office all day?

    • It means they're going to charge more for it.
    • I think you're hitting on part of the reason they're shutting down. AR, currently, is a technology that's still waiting on a usable application for it. So far no one has been able to find something to use it for that can't be done in any number of different ways and often for way cheaper.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tuidjy ( 321055 )

        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.

      • 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.

      • At the time DAQRI shut down the most used app by far was Show (https://daqri.com/worksense) which let a web or other smart glasses user video chat with a worker and draw over what they were seeing, providing instructions. This really is a killer app for inspections/maintenance/problem diagnosis in an industrial setting --- similar phone/tablet apps are much more cumbersome. Tag and Guide were distant seconds in usage but were getting serious traction at Intel, Fabio Perini and others. Sadly the $$$ hole we
      • I won't disagree with you... but I will say that there could be a lot more to it than that.

        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
    • "Enterprise-grade AR headsets" seems to be TechCrunch's invention. Enterprise-grade means nothing re: the hardware, though MAYBE the glasses could take a harder knock than the HoloLens. We just targeted the industrial space with our app suite, Worksense. Source: I was a DAQRI employee for quite a few years.
  • We were fantasizing about this technology in the 80s. It's obviously much better today but still falling short of where it ultimately needs to be for mass adoption. Even the big players with massive backing have struggled.

  • You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.

  • 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.

  • Their first gen one had a definite Robocop vibe.

    https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]

  • I like my epson bt-300. The AR visuals are sharp and while you don't have a big field of view, it works great in the light and with glasses. That being said, it uses an INTEL processor on an android without the play store. I managed to root the fucking thing but it still crashes on me because of it. THIS is the problem with AR. All these companies want to be "The One" to make it, but all their offerings are behind gated stores. VR might not be huage on a google phone but its big enough, because of the

    • 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

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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