Ubiquity6, a startup that makes AR social and familiar, has released an app "Display.land" that enables you to capture, edit, and share real space

Display.land, an augmented reality app launched by Ubiquity6, lets you capture, edit, mix, and share the world around you with others.

By synthesizing the real and digital worlds in this way, reality becomes a canvas for creatives to paint with virtual images. The app is available for iOS and his Android. It works by capturing a sense of space, using the image processing power of smartphones and photogrammetry, or more precisely, by interpreting and stitching together photographs. It also utilizes Ubiquity6's cloud server.

With Display.land, your camera becomes a scanner that scans the world. Users can freely move the camera around in space, which Ubiquity6's computer vision technology reconstructs in digital form. Then it becomes a "digital space", and you can decorate it with emoticons, decals, and paintbrushes in real time. You can make the space your own, or share it with the touch of a button on your smartphone.

Ubiquity6 CEO Anjney Midha said in an interview with VentureBeat.

People around the world are using this in ways we never expected. Anyone with a smartphone can transform their real-world location into a shared digital space with centimeter-level accuracy. Then you can create a 3D interactive experience within that space. It's like using a game engine, but you don't have to be a professional game developer. You can share it with whoever you like. This is just the beginning of what we can do for you.

Ubiquity6's software leverages smartphone camera, navigation and motion detection data. It is possible to reconfigure the space of the real world and intervene there digitally. You can create things like architectural annotations, spatial photo albums, and moving scenes that are instantly viewable through mobile and desktop web browsers and VR devices using simple URLs.

The company plans to introduce even more powerful creative tools over time.

We have married the best parts of the game engine. Multiplayer and photogrammetry usually only available to top professionals. People are just beginning to capture the spaces they love and share them with family and friends in ways that weren't possible before. We've turned ordinary people into game-level creators with our Early Access version. And now we're rolling out that power to everyone with a common smartphone around the world. (Mr. Midha)

One cool feature is that you can create an AR space in the real world and share it with others.

I saw a demo of this technology in action at their San Francisco headquarters. The Ubiquity6 team used a smartphone camera and computer vision software to capture the company's lobby, inserting a movable basketball goal and a movable ball.

I aimed the ball by tilting the camera and pressed the button to shoot. The basketball was shot towards the goal and I had to keep adjusting until the ball entered the goal on the timer. Meanwhile, Midha shared the same space with another smartphone. Just by sharing the URL with someone, your friends can enter the same space. Midha showed it by throwing the ball into the same goal.

Midha showed us images that people have captured from around the world. One has captured half of the legendary Roman Colosseum. When he shared this, another said he would capture the other half when he went on a trip. That means someone can take a file and share it with someone else, and Ubiquity6 can piece those realities together. People are free to mix and share different creations, and get credit for sharing. You or your friends can annotate the space with 3D objects, notes, photos and links.

Midha also attached a virtual rabbit to himself, which followed him around the room as he walked.

Basically what we did is layer a shareable sustainable world on top of the real world. It uses only smartphones, but you can see it in action from any platform. (Mr. Midha)

I also scanned my living room. I just twirled around and the app collected a point cloud of everything in the room. The app told me it had done a minimal amount of scanning, so I sent the data in for processing. We could have collected the "maximum" amount of data, but we didn't. For transmission, Ubiquity6's software compressed the data so it wasn't too heavy to send over a network or Wi-Fi.

It took a while to process, but when it was ready, I could see it in real time. The finished image was a 3D rendering of my living room. There were gaps that would have been filled if we had collected the maximum amount of data. You could also make it public and share it with the community by hitting the publish button.

People around the world are using this in ways we never expected. Anyone with a smartphone can transform their real-world location into a shared digital space with centimeter-level accuracy. Then you can create a 3D interactive experience within that space. It's like using a game engine, but you don't have to be a professional game developer. You can share it with whoever you like. (Mr. Midha)

Since the beta launch, Display.land's community maps have continued to grow, according to Midha, from the graffiti-filled streets of Barcelona and the coffee shops of Tokyo, to the secret gardens of London and the basements of Sausalito. Thousands of real-world photos from more than 50 countries have been shared by users, all the way to the tunnel.

Every day, people at Display.land learn new things about each other's cultures from all over the world by sharing their favorite spaces, he said.

Midha says Ubiquity6's technology solves problems that have long plagued people in the industry, including enabling experiences that continue to be shared over time in massive amounts of augmented reality.

Display.land is based on Ubiquity6's Reality Engine, an end-to-end cloud pipeline that combines computer vision, machine learning, real-time 3D graphics, and persistent, multiplayer networking.

Created by the Ubiquity6 team, which hails from Stanford University, Twitter, Zynga, Unity, and more, the Ubiquity6 Reality Engine is designed for cross-platform compatibility, massive sharing, and sustained AR and VR on any device. experience.

Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon said in a statement:

People love going out to shared spaces like arcades, playgrounds, and studios to interact and create together. What the internet absolutely needs to do is bring those social connections online. By creating spaces you love, sharing them with friends, and building them into anything you want together, Display.land makes it easier than ever. It's a mix of sustained world-building games with real-world friends and spaces.

Ubiquity6 was founded in July 2017 by Midha and Ankit Kumar.

We met in college as undergraduates at Stanford. The next few years took a slightly different path. (Mr. Midha)

Midha was a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, where he worked with one of EA's co-founders, Gordon. Based on what he saw, Midha thought it would be some time before some of the most promising of computer vision, his AR and AI would come to fruition. Kumar, on the other hand, has been through several startups and believed that graphics processing units (GPUs) and navigation technology would advance rapidly.

He believed that this great graphical potential, which was mostly the server of the game world, was starting to become more accessible to all consumers. He thought there was a way to make smartphones understand the world with an accuracy of a few centimeters. And now, through cameras, we can see each other exactly where they are in the real world. (Mr. Midha)

They started working together on a side project and found each other wrong. It turned out to be more difficult than Kumar expected, and contrary to Midha's expectations, it was possible. Once the prototype was ready, they started a new company.

When we set up the basketball goal, we were able to watch each other throw the ball in real time. And when you do, you can now look at the camera and actually play together, as opposed to looking down at your phone and playing in your own world. I found that to be extremely significant. (Mr. Midha)

They went to a museum and put together an exhibition where 150 people could paint the ceiling with virtual colors while watching what others were doing in the same space at the same time.

It was my first experience with something like this. To have so many players connected to the network at the same time in one space. The average session time was 45 minutes, and some 65-year-olds weren't interested in the game at all. (Mr. Midha)

Ubiquity6 has raised US$37.5 million to date. Investors include Benchmark, Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Gradient Ventures. The company has 65 employees. Ubiquity6's Display.land is free, but the company hopes to eventually charge for using the advanced tools.

Our goal is to help people transform their physical worlds into these digital worlds, enabling shareable social interactions like you and I experienced. This is something that you normally only experience in the physical world on the playground, or in a sandbox environment only when you're creating in the studio. Children now have a sandbox environment in the real world. Adults have it in the virtual world by playing massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. But no one has been able to coordinate those acts. (Mr. Midha)

[via VentureBeat] @VentureBeat

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