Tonchidot, the Japanese startup behind the augmented reality browser Sekai Camera, raised $4 million from DCM and existing investor ITOCHU Technology Ventures. Augmented reality is a young field that lets you superimpose data and graphics over the real world in a camera viewfinder.
Layar, which has forged early leadership in the nascent but inspiring field of “augmented reality,” is about to finish raising a round of more than $1 million.
ugmented Reality (AR), the overlay of graphics onto a video stream or other real-time display, has existed for more than 15 years, with customized applications in industrial automation, theme parks, sports television, military displays, and online marketing. Recently, an entirely new mass market has opened up in mobile handsets, due to the availability of video cameras, processors, GPS data, compasses, and accelerometers on smartphone handset platforms. In particular, personal navigation applications for the Apple iPhone and Android platforms have seen strong early adoption, due to the intuitive nature of the real-time display.
The recent influx of augmented reality applications hitting the Android Market has developers scrambling to promote and differentiate their app from competing works.
Augmented reality is one of the big buzzwords of the moment – using a camera-equipped mobile handset to overlay information on the real world, such as location sensitive data or directions.
acrossair is a new kind of company – a hybrid collective combining rockstar application and game developers with corporate infrastructure to cover all those mundane things like marketing, sales and finance.
Mobilizy is an early pioneer in commercial augmented reality and the creator of Wikitude, which is the first practical augmented reality (AR) mobile application. Wikitude gives the user data about their surroundings, nearby landmarks, and other points of interest by overlaying information on the real-time camera view of a smart-phone.
