Less than a week after debuting its AR Cloud platform in public with a multi-user installation of more than 100 participants, Ubiquity6 announced on Tuesday that it has closed a Series B round of funding totaling $27 million.
Led by Benchmark and Index Ventures, the latest round of funding comes less than five months after the company closed a $10.5 million funding round that included Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused venture fund, among the participating investors.
The funding serves as an encore for the company's public debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on Aug. 9, where participants were able to simultaneously interact with AR content inspired by the surrealist works of René Magritte on display at the museum.
"Augmented reality could be one of the greatest inventions of our time, but there is no clear path to mass adoption. We believe that leveraging the millions of smartphones already in consumers' hands to create a meaningful shared experience is how we will unlock AR's full potential," said Anjney Midha, CEO and co-founder of Ubiquity6, in a statement.
"We previewed this technology by bringing over a hundred people together to play test the experience at the SFMOMA; eventually we will open up our tools for anyone to easily create and experience AR with those around them - from their two closest friends to hundreds of people."
The AR cloud and its ability to facilitate multiplayer experiences, persistent content, and occluded vision, are a hot commodity right now in the augmented reality community. Location-based gaming pioneer Niantic and startup 6D.ai have recently shown off what the private betas of their own platforms can do using the dynamic.
Meanwhile, Google, who has also invested in another AR cloud company in Blue Vision, which has launched its own multiplayer platform with Cloud Anchors for Android and iOS, and Apple will bring multiplayer capabilities and persistence support to ARKit 2.0.
In addition to computer vision-enabled multi-user experiences, Ubiquity6 offers some unique propositions that set it apart from the rest of the AR cloud crowd, such as promising easy content creation without "deep experience" in programming. Also, the platform includes a "spatial browser" for end users to discover and launch AR experiences and share them with others.
"The combination of these three things finally enables the spatial internet," wrote Midha in a blog post. "[A spatial internet] where we're able to share our lives unconstrained, freely, in all three coordinate axes, in useful and magical ways, something we've seen repeatedly over the last year in bigger and bigger shared spaces."
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