Jaunt acquires Teleporter, Personify’s real-time 3D AR asset streamer
If you’ve been waiting for live, hologram-like human beings to pop up in AR or VR experiences, that wait’s almost over. Mixed reality company Jaunt announced today that it has acquired Teleporter, a solution for turning people and objects into real-time 3D video streams that can be displayed within AR and VR apps.
Developed by a Chicago-based team at Personify, Teleporter is described as software to capture, process, and stream lifelike AR assets online. Jaunt has acquired both the Teleporter system and the engineers behind it, including a seven-person team led by former Personify CTO Simon Venshtain. The team and its patent portfolio will support the Jaunt XR Platform, a B2B solution designed to let customers distribute mixed reality assets through their own applications.
In an August profile of Jaunt, VentureBeat explained how the company is using an array of six Intel RealSense cameras to capture a circular video of a moving person, turning the video and depth data into a volumetric stream that represents the person’s body and motions. The person can then be inserted into an AR or VR app as a hologram-like avatar, interacting in real time with the user — including gesturing in 3D and talking.
Real-world applications for the technology include concepts previously only imagined in science fiction. An AR mapping app could include a way to call for a pop-up human assistant, for instance, while a hospital or doctor’s office could dial up a nurse to provide personalized medical assistance.
Jaunt founder and CTO Arthur van Hoff says that the Teleporter acquisition will help the company “move further into the extended reality arena with the Jaunt XR Platform at the core of our business. We’re honing in on fully immersive virtual, mixed, and augmented reality experiences, and are thrilled to advance those technologies with the help of our new Chicago-based team.” The new Chicago office will join Jaunt facilities in San Mateo and Los Angeles, California; New York City; and Shanghai.
Source: VentureBeat
