Since its foundation in 2015, Holo-Light has been at the forefront of the extended reality industry. From its early days experimenting with an early Microsoft HoloLens, Holo-Light now provides a powerful immersive streaming platform for augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR). With major companies such as BMW and Deutsche Telekom using Holo-Light’s XRnow platform, the company has set itself the goal of becoming in the extended reality world what “Netflix” is for the video content economy.

We sat down with Holo-Light’s CEO, Florian Haspinger, to talk about its outlook for extended reality (XR) technologies, as well as the company’s ambitious growth plans and their view on market developments. Future Energy Ventures has been a proud investor in Holo-Light since 2018 and has been working closely with the team ever since. Now with more than 40 employees in Munich, Germany, and Innsbruck, Austria, the company is a leading visionary in the global AR/VR tech space.

 

Florian

Florian Haspinger, Holo-Light’s CEO

 

Can you tell us a bit about what your company does, what problems you solve for your customers, and what you are focusing on at the moment?

Florian: We are a young, diverse software company with many unique personalities who give their best every day to unleash the full potential of augmented and virtual reality in the enterprise market. With our offering, we help companies establish scalable use cases and business models for AR and VR. Nowadays, every player in the field faces major challenges that limit the growth and roll-out of immersive technologies.

That’s why we are building a global Streaming as a Service platform to host and stream any XR application. With XRnow we are creating the “Netflix” for AR and VR. By adding the power of the cloud, we can surpass current bottlenecks like the limited performance of mobile devices, a fragmented device market, or concerns about data security.

How did you come up with the idea for Holo-Light?

Florian: We founded Holo-Light in 2015, at a time when the augmented reality was a relatively new industry. We were able to get our hands on one of Microsoft’s first AR smart glasses, the HoloLens, and we saw huge potential for industrial use. We used this to create our first solutions and refine our goal to develop industry-ready augmented reality software that would close the gap between virtual planning and the real world.

Talk us through the “Product Suite” of Holo-Light. What are the different products on offer?

Florian: Our core products are the XR streaming solution ISAR SDK (Interactive Streaming for Augmented Reality) and AR engineering software AR3S (Augmented Reality Engineering Space). ISAR SDK is the cross-platform remote rendering solution to bring high-performance XR experiences to mobile devices. By integrating ISAR into your AR/VR application, you can stream the entire app via local servers or via the cloud – making it possible to visualize and interact with high-quality 3D content.

AR3S is a powerful XR application for engineers and designers to work and collaborate on 3D CAD models in a mixed reality environment. The software offers them a new tool to improve and simplify workflows in planning, product development, and production. With the XRnow streaming platform, we are about to take the next step towards shaping the present and the future of the immersive landscape. By merging our lighthouse products ISAR SDK and AR3S into an all-encompassing ecosystem, we are creating the most powerful immersive streaming platform for AR and VR.

Holo-Light has won numerous awards in Europe and North America. What makes Holo-Light different from its competitors?

Florian: Moving XR streaming to a cloud-based platform with marketplace-like capabilities gives us a unique advantage today. We already have 90 customers including the likes of BMW, Danfoss and Deutsche Telekom using the platform to get the best out of their applications. Our technology provides them with the potential for mass adoption of their XR use cases and mass roll-outs in less time than ever before.

We provide the only industry-ready platform solution that is optimized for industrial network conditions and meets the requirements of the industry in terms of integration capability. Companies like BMW, for example, use our ISAR XR streaming empowered AR software AR3S Pro to speed up vehicle design processes by as much as 12 months.

What is your long-term vision for Holo-Light?

Florian: Our vision is to unleash the full potential of augmented and virtual reality. We are creating the most powerful immersive streaming platform for the AR/VR world with the largest cloud provider in the world, Amazon Web Services (AWS). By streaming apps from XRnow, we simplify the use of XR applications and open the door to the next evolutionary stage of augmented and virtual reality. We cut the boundaries from the digital to the real world to an absolute minimum – as content will be available everywhere at any time. We want to be no less than the future “Netflix” of the XR economy.

What, in your opinion, is currently the most exciting trend or development in the augmented and virtual reality world?

Florian: Everyone in the AR/VR world is currently talking about the Metaverse, a massive communal cyberspace, linking augmented reality and virtual reality. The AR Cloud is another exciting development with the goal to create a persistent digital 3D representation of the real world, enabling shared AR experiences by multiple users and devices. Our platform, XRnow, is an enabler to both undertakings as streaming will be key to realizing the content everywhere, at any time and in high-quality mantra. Currently, XR data may be stored in the cloud, but computing still happens on the mobile end device.

Consequently, the limitations in performance significantly hinder the experience of realistic content assets. With XRnow, we take the data as well as the computing to the cloud, making it possible to visualize data in photorealistic quality from everywhere. We are creating a new layer to the Metaverse and AR Cloud. AR and VR also enable one of the most dazzling applications of 5G. 5G needs new immersive technologies like XR streaming to open the door for industry-changing apps and flagship use cases.

Outsourcing the rendering process to a powerful external server and streaming via 5G networks will be the key to limitless usage of mobile XR applications.

What do you look for in an investor? What makes Future Energy Ventures different?

Florian: We are looking for investors that help us grow and understand the technology market as well as the needs of enterprises. Investors should have the expertise to setup an organization that can grow globally and succeed. With Future Energy Ventures, we found a partner that understood our culture, helped us grow from the Seed Stage and is very committed to Holo-Light’s further expansion. Together we can always make fast, insightful decisions and tackle issues head-on.

Future Energy Ventures’ view on Holo-Light:

Holo-Light has been one of FEV’s early-stage (seed) investments since 2018. The team’s deep understanding of the complexity of AR technology and their compelling vision for the market are what convinced us initially to invest. Back then, we were looking for strong XR applications to improve collaboration and security training.

We are proud that today the team has continuously invested in becoming a deep technology powerhouse, enabling them to understand today’s bottlenecks of XR deployment. With one of its core product features, XR streaming, now at a level of such technological relevance, the company has been able to further enhance its offering through XRnow, providing a streaming service for the AR/VR community.

 

Learn more about Holo-Light at https://holo-light.com

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