Trace Begins AR Creation Drive with $2 Million
With $2 million in funding led by Impellent Ventures and Rev1 Ventures, Trace, a location-based infrastructure for creating augmented reality, said today that it is launching to make it easier for companies to publish their content online.
Everywhere Ventures, Move VC, Service Provider Capital, the Ohio Innovation Fund, Phoenix Venture Fund, Allied Venture Partners, Portland Seed Fund, and Astir Ventures, and all participated in the startup’s overcrowded pre-seed investment. Participating in the round were Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, three other significant extended reality backers.
Co-founders Greg Tran, Martin Smith, and Sean Couture of Magic Leap Inc., a unicorn maker of AR headsets, formed Trace in 2021. The business is well renowned for creating and releasing expensive augmented reality headsets with a business focus; the Magic Leap 2 was the most recent model to arrive in 2022.
Using a headgear or a mobile device as a window, augmented reality technology overlays computer-generated graphics over the user’s field of view, enabling a combination of virtual and real-world things. With the help of Trace’s platform, companies can create location-based augmented reality offerings for smartphones and other devices, such Apple Inc.’s Vision Pro mixed reality headgear or AR glasses.
Greg Tran, co-founder and chief executive of Magic Leap, formerly held the positions of creative director and principle designer, stated that producing augmented reality content is usually a difficult process that is only accessible to specialists and organisations. With Trace’s beginner-friendly construction method, AR installations that used to take months can now be completed in a matter of minutes. Trace can do for augmented reality what SquareSpace and Canva did for webpages and visual design, respectively.
The business stated that while the introduction of the Vision Pro has contributed to the wider acceptance of spatial computing, a large portion of AR content available now is still rooted in a time when smartphones were largely used for 2D screens. The term spatial computing mostly refers to comprehensive tracking features that allow 3D virtual items to be placed in the actual environment and be able to monitor their location and interact with tangible objects.
This implies that holographic items, like a virtual beachball or a character from a video game, might be seen as being in the actual environment, interact with the user’s fingertips, or even vanish beneath other things like a sofa, wall, or hedge.
Members of Trace’s team come from a variety of communities, including the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Walt Disney Co., and Harvard University. The firm stated that it was founded on the idea that augmented reality (AR) material works best when it is tightly interwoven with its actual environment, offering an immersive experience and simple interactivity.
The startup said that despite not having made its public debut until recently, it has already helped clients create augmented reality experiences, such as the Hip Hop 50 Summit for big-box retailers. Additionally, it took part in Mobile World Congress stimulation for Deutsche Telekom AG.
Early users of Trace include T-Mobile US Inc., Qualcomm Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd., and Microsoft Corp., despite the platform being in beta. The firm uses its products for a variety of reasons, such as retail product presentations and employee education.
Elmar Schrage, head of corporate XR development at Deutsche Telekom, stated that the company’s mixed reality encounter at Mobile World Congress 2023, powered by Trace, produced really outstanding results. The team can launch high-fidelity immersive experiences thanks to Trace’s distinctive end-to-end, intuitive methodology. With Trace, the company’s sales force may show complicated items to consumers in an efficient manner or just wow them in their premier locations.
