The world of phone-based AR has involved a lot of promises, but the future that developed has so far been more iterative and less platform shift-y.
For startups exclusively focused on mobile AR, there been some soul-searching to find ways to bring more lightweight experiences to life that don&t require as much friction or commitment from users.8th Wall is a team focused on building developer tools for mobile AR experiences.
The startup has raised more than $10 million to usher developers into the augmented world.Augmented reality developer tools startup 8th Wall raises $8 millionThe company announced this week that they&ve built a one-stop shop authoring platform that will help its customers create and ship AR experiences that will be hosted by 8th Wall .
It a step forward in what they&ve been trying to build and a further sign that marketing activations are probably the most buoyant money-makers in the rather flat phone-based AR space at the moment.The editor supports popular immersive web frameworks like A-Frame, three.js and Babylon.js.
It a development platform, but while game engine tools like Unity have features focused on heavy rendering, 8th Wall is more interested in &very fast, lightweight projects that can be built up to any scale,& the startup CEO Erik Murphy tells TechCrunch.8th Wall initial sell was an augmented reality platform akin to ARKit and ARCore that allowed developers to build content that supported a wider breadth of smartphones.
Today, 8th Wall team of 14 is focused on a technology called WebAR that allows mobile phones to call up web experiences inside the browser.The main sell of WebAR is the same appeal of web apps; users don&t need to download anything and they can access the experience with just a link.
This is great for branded marketing interactions, where expecting users to download an app is pretty laughable; moving this process to the web with a link or a QR code makes life much easier.The startup cloud-based authoring and hosting platform is available now for its agency andbusiness users.