Developing an emerging area of technology requires investment. We create innovative initiatives that permit us and our clients to invest in applied research. We get our hands dirty and work to grasp the problems that are likely to prevent growth in a technology area. Our projects cover use of AR in enterprise, in urban environments and initiatives that reduce obstacles to interoperability between AR systems.


Enterprise AR

AR is a feature of technology-assisted systems that accelerates discovery and increases utility of contextually relevant information (personal, business or public data).

All industries have use for AR-enhanced tools and systems, however, today the technology enablers are not sufficiently mature to meet end user expectations in all situations and in uncontrolled environments.
We are collaborating with leaders in automotive, aviation, marine, energy, utilities, manufacturing and construction to reduce the barriers for AR to have high return on investment (ROI) in their processes to reduce risk, increase effective/well-informed decision making and accelerate business profitability.

The result of our collaborations is the AR for Enterprise Alliance.

Urban AR

We lead initiatives that focus on the use of AR in the built environment. We organize these initiatives to demonstrate how emerging technology enables more deep engagement with the human environment and will provide us all a better future.

3D Geospatial Geneva Showcase

3D_Geneva_Model

The  3D Geospatial Geneva Showcase features the achievements of developers using advanced mobile technology in the city of Geneva to illustrate current state-of-the-art for in-situ capture, analysis and visualization of geospatial and geospatially-referenced data.

This activity aggregates data sets about the Geneva lake, city and park zones from open, public and private sources, and offers everyone the opportunity to build services illustrating the latest innovations using open standards, open source technologies and proprietary solutions.
We seek to stimulate the design and implementation of new services that reach beyond simple map-based outdoor navigation to points of interest. We highly encourage individuals, academic institutions and companies to develop and showcase their innovation and talents in this showcase.

City WalkShops


During City WalkShops, people with different perspectives—the architects, the designers, the policy makers and citizens—on the same city can come into direct contact with the technologists, the geeks who implant and manage the digital infrastructure on our behalf. We explore and expand our understanding.

We partner with local groups to design and conduct WalkShops in Barcelona, New York City and Zurich to experiment with sources of urban data and the visualization of information about local objects using augmented reality and other technologies.
We are also building the tools to help other organizers and experience developers conduct successful WalkShops in their own cities.

Learn more about the WalkShops we have conducted:

Precise Positioning and Navigation Testbed

People spend 80 percent of their time indoors. How will our technologies know where we are and what we are doing within the built environment? The same technologies we use for indoor positioning can assist us to position users more precisely anywhere.

Our ground-breaking initiative to advance the science of precise positioning is the Precise Positioning and Navigation Testbed. The testbed is the first opportunity for precise positioning technology providers and integrators to deploy in the Gran Via venue in Barcelona and see how their technologies perform.
Hosting organizations GSMA and Fira de Barcelona are partnering with sponsors to offer this unique real-world environment and invite leading companies to learn for themselves how well they can complete our course. The testbed was designed in collaboration with our scientific advisory committee, composed of professionals and researchers with extensive experience in precise indoor positioning.

AR-4-Basel Framework for Innovation

We are the engine behind the highly successful AR-4-Basel framework for innovation. AR-4-Basel pushes technological boundaries and inspires creators while bringing new experiences to the citizens and visitors of Basel.

Our vision is that by making public and private data sets for cities available to the thousands of augmented reality developers using commercial and research platforms around the world, new experiences blending digital data and the real world will be created.
The data can be visualized for professional applications (e.g., energy management, emergency response, decision making and resource management policies) or for consumers (e.g., tourism, search, how to find your friends and other mobile services).

We are applying the lessons learned in this project to other cities around the world.

Look for AR experiences in your urban environment!

AR Interoperability

Today a user equipped with an AR-ready device, including sensors and appropriate output/display support, must download a proprietary application to experience content published by an AR experience authoring platform. This is comparable to the era prior to interoperability between e-mail clients and before the Web was viewable from any W3C-standard compliant browser.

Working with leading companies in the AR ecosystem, we are forging a future in which AR content and experiences are open and interoperable.
The AR Browser Interoperability Engineering Initiative is defining interoperability between AR browsers and AR content management systems without jeapordizing differentiation and innovation.

The AR Standards Community is a grassroots initiative for the advancement of open and interoperable AR is working together actively. To learn more about the AR Standards Community, visit the portal.

The Open AR Cloud Association is a recently-formed community of stakeholders seeking to develop open and interoperable spatial computing technology and standards to connect the physical and digital worlds. OARC Working Groups focus on specific obstacles; WG members are collaborating to define solutions and reach consensus on how obstacles can be addressed.