I recently had dinner with Shawn Frayne, founder and CEO of Looking Glass Factory, a startup with offices in Brooklyn and Hong Kong. He’s the sort of entrepreneur who is Hell bent on changing the world or at least the Immersive Technology portion of it.
I recently attended the 10th annual Augmented World Expo (AWE) at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley. With 7,000 attendees— up almost 25 percent from last year— over 350 speakers and 250 booth exhibits, it was by far the biggest event ever for the Immersive Technology community.
ItSeemstoMe is my personal blog and newsletter. It is for business decision makers and is about disruptive technologies. I mostly cover Immersive Technologies such as AR and non-gaming VR as well as AI-powered products such as autonomous cars, robots, chatbots, drones and wearable tech. I am always looking for a good story and if you have one, we should talk.
I am an advisor to the San Francisco chapter of the VR/AR Association. At a recent event, I learned about…
I met Exit VR co-founder Ilya Druzhnikov on an extremely rainy night at a tech event in Pacifica. We were two of only three people who showed up, so it gave us time to talk. I learned that he and Yoni Koenig, his business partner, had devised a rare business model that promises to be lucrative and sustainable.
In 2016, at a time when both the tech and entertainment communities were going bonkers over the near-term promise of VR and AR, Ilya and Yoni decided to run a field test. They took a battered old van and converted it into a mobile VR lab. Equipped with state-of-the-industry VR gear, they would park it where people gathered in the many diverse neighborhoods of San Francisco. They would vary the price for viewing as well as the time per visit and the apps that were shown.
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