A new startup called Campfire emerged to announce a familiar AR headset design and reveal it raised more than $8 million from investors.
The system is built partially on the bones of Meta, the startup founded by Meron Gribetz which raised around $75 million before it ran out of cash a couple years ago and its pieces were sold by a bank. Some of those pieces were purchased by a venture capital firm and reborn as Campfire with CEO Jay Wright recruited to deliver a new solution.
So what’s different this time around?
“I think one of the things that’s been really challenging for everyone in this space is focus,” Wright said in an interview with UploadVR in response to a question about why Meta failed. “It’s hard to pick a direction and just do one thing.”
Wright sees Campfire’s offering as a focused product aiming to solve a single problem. Namely, he’s targeting the ability for professionals to view 3D models in AR pulled from their existing workflows. “We’re not depending on a developer ecosystem and don’t offer an SDK,” a document outlining the company explains. Wright declined to provide pricing details at this time but plans to ship commercially later this year with subscription pricing.
The startup claims the product will offer a 92-degree diagonal field of view with an accessory to turn a phone into a controller and the x-shaped “console” shown in the image above meant to be a physical object above which 3D content can be centered for easy reference. “There’s no ‘where am I? Where are you? Where should we be looking?’ Those questions are answered implicitly. You look at the console like you look at a monitor,” the document for Campfire explains.
So what do you think? Is Campfire going to succeed where Meta failed? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
