What fascinates you about AR?
For me, what’s most fascinating about AR technology is the possibility to add a digital dimension to the real world that delivers an entirely new experience to us.
I also find it exciting that AR can be applied to so many different areas. On the one hand, AR can have fun, entertainment-based functions, on the other hand, it can provide solutions to real-world issues.
Let me give you two examples:
- In the marketing sector, for instance, companies or agencies can leverage AR to strengthen their advertising and brand campaigns by conveying a much more meaningful and engaging message to their customers.
- My second example refers to the educational space. Here, I see great opportunities for educators and trainers to turn topics that are generally perceived as rather dull into enticing, immersive learning experiences for their learners. AR visualizations can help make abstract concepts more comprehendible, especially in mathematics, physics, or sciences in general. I’m thinking, for example, of complex forms or shapes that teachers can make much more relatable and tangible for their students by using AR.
Speaking of relatable, what’s your relation to AR and why did you choose to work in this field?
When I started familiarizing myself with AR, my focus was still very much on industrial applications. Having worked as a consultant in the industrial space before, I already had some great insights into common industrial processes, but was also always on the lookout for new and innovative technologies that contribute to a safe and productive work environment. For me, this combination between the well-established industrial world, on the one hand, and AR as a new disruptive technology, on the other hand, was an interesting concept to pursue.
In 2020, I thus joined the Korea-based industrial XR solutions company Virnect, which operates a research center in Vienna. Once we realized that we had built a pretty solid technological basis here in Vienna, we had the idea of making our self-developed tracking and recognition technology available to a bigger audience, and hence the concept of SQUARS was born, our all-in-one AR creation and sharing platform.
How does SQUARS make AR available to larger audiences?
Our underlying consideration was to make AR as easily accessible as possible, especially in the context of marketing both for the creator and viewer of the augmented content. Therefore, we made our platform fully web-based. This means that the use of our software doesn’t rely on any native app or expert knowledge in coding. All you need to immerse yourself into the world of AR is a device with a camera and access to the web. From there, you can create, view, and share your AR experiences, all in one place.
In the end, this easy access to AR benefits both the AR-novice looking for fun activities to spice up their lives, and the ones seeking to use AR in a commercial context.
Our main focus in this respect is to offer a seamless experience to marketing professionals. SQUARS is designed to facilitate AR marketing and to make sure that advertising agencies have all the tools they need readily available.
For instance, we provide an asset library with ready-to-use 3D models. Additionally, our one-of-a-kind AR project collaboration features let teams smoothly work together: you can share your project with others, assign them specific access rights, and give each other feedback. To put in a nutshell, we’re bringing all the desired project management features you’d expect from a well-established software over into the AR space.
In which specific areas do you still see particular room for improvement when it comes to AR in general?
There are many buzzwords floating around in the space that have unclear meanings, which hinders the adoption of AR in my opinion. In some cases, the applications are also rather impractical and not very intuitive, at times adding complexity rather than reducing it. At SQUARS, we are thinking more into the direction of taking AR away from the nice-to-have towards adopting a more problem-solving approach, with the aim to optimize and tailor our solutions to the actual needs of our users, which we believe is still lacking today.
Another challenge in the area of AR is related to cost and convenience. If you want to experience AR to its fullest, you often need to purchase quite expensive devices that are not the easiest to set up.
That’s why we’ve created an AR environment optimized for mobile use, since that’s a device pretty much all of us already possess and won’t have to spend any extra money on. As most of us have their phones on them 24/7 in one way or another, optimizing AR for mobile use makes sense from a practical but also business perspective.
What would you say differentiates SQUARS from other WebAR providers on the market?
In my view, 3 main factors stand out:
- an unrivaled price-performance for our packages
In addition to our free plan, we provide by far the best price-performance ratio when it comes to usage within the AR space.
- the stability of our tracking and recognition technology
The tracking and recognition technology we use has been developed fully inhouse and offers probably the most stable WebAR experiences you can currently get.
- intuitive team collaboration features
We wanted to make it is super easy for our users to collaborate directly within our platform, which is particularly relevant for the AR marketing space as our services can prevent tedious and unnecessary feedback loops.
In your Workspace, for instance, you have an overview of all your current projects, you can add team members to each project, and you can assign each member specific access and editing rights. In addition, simultaneous, real-time collaboration via chat within the Studio will be available soon.
What would you say to a person who would like to join SQUARS?
Irrespectively of whether your interest lies with the engineering or the business side, what’s most fascinating about the work here is that we’re a young company with a clear focus in mind: creating great AR experiences.
At SQUARS, you’ve lots of opportunities to think deep and hard on how to overcome challenges and how to best solve them. So anyone inspired by innovation and the idea of creating something from scratch will find joy in working with us.
Successful candidates will also find a great environment with plenty of workspace, free hardware, an open and clear team structure, as well as a working culture rooted in the spirit of togetherness and mutual respect.
What else would you like to add?
I would like to reiterate that WebAR is a fascinating topic not only from a technical, but also from a business side of view, and that it’ll definitely be going places.
What I can tell you already for sure is that WebAR will have a big role to play particularly in the marketing and educational sphere, but I’m convinced that it’ll gradually find its way into other industries, as well.