Campfire Charts New Path With Turnkey AR/VR Solution For Collaboration

Republished By Plato

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‘By focusing on specific needs for design and engineering, Campfire has reimagined the entire stack to deliver an experience that takes a giant step toward the vision—and more importantly enables a giant step in productivity’

Quick read

➨ Campfire emerges from stealth after raising $8 million in seed capital from OTV, Kli Capital, Tuesday Capital and other investors

➨ The startup has developed a new augmented and virtual reality headset, plus a central console and a peripheral that turns a smartphone into a controller, as well as two software apps

➨ Pricing isn’t currently available, but Campfire says everything will be available on a subscription basis

The story

Former Qualcomm executive Jay Wright, who led development of the Vuforia augmented reality tool, has brought startup Campfire out of stealth—and unveiled a hardware and software stack aimed at enhancing rather than reinventing design and engineering work and collaboration using immersive technologies.

Campfire is actually a reinvention of sorts. It is the result of venture capital firm OTV’s (Olive Tree Ventures) acquisition of headset developer Meta Company’s intellectual property and technology in 2018.

OTV brought in Wright and opted to pursue a “different approach” to that of Meta Company, which developed the Meta 2 headset and a wide FOV (field of view) display system.

At the time of his appointment, Campfire co-founder Wright, who oversaw Vuforia during his time at Qualcomm and then after it was sold to PTC in 2015, promised to “build a new company, a new product”. With Campfire and his executive management team, which includes co-founder and chief operating officer Roy Ashok and founding adviser Avi-Bar Zeev, he focused their efforts on the collaboration use case, in product design and engineering, and has certainly delivered.

Campfire emerges from stealth today, after raising $8 million in seed capital from OTV, Kli Capital, Tuesday Capital and other investors, with a new augmented and virtual reality headset, plus a central console and a peripheral that turns a smartphone into a controller, as well as two software apps, all designed to remove difficulty, decrease discomfort and improve accessibility for enterprise and professional users.

The entire stack is designed to slot into existing workflows and extend current technologies, most notably PCs and mobile devices, rather than introduce an entirely new computing platform, like Magic Leap’s “spatial” attempt before it or as Microsoft is currently doing with HoloLens and its own brand of mixed reality. There will be no developer ecosystem. Campfire is offering everything a product designer or engineer will need.

Less immersive, more useful

Campfire says the new headset delivers “stunning” visual quality with a wide FOV in augmented reality, and a new level of comfort in virtual reality.

Although technical specifications are not yet available, Campfire says the headset tethers to a PC with a discrete GPU, Windows 10 2004, and a Thunderbolt-3 port with a USB-C connector, backing up the claim that it’s capable of delivering excellent visuals.