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Why I Did What I Did
The Past
I come from a humble background - I'm not a flashy tech CEO - nor do I really want to be. Hell, just recently I shelved that title and went for the moniker of CVO - Chief Visionary Officer, as really, that's more me. I've always seen things where they fit together best and how to make them more efficient.
In 2011 I came across Augmented Reality - and I had an epiphany.
Some have heard this story in pieces - this is the first time I have distilled it down to the essence of my journey - there was heartache along the way, bad decisions, but, honestly, who doesn't have those stories? I'm proud to be part of the club of learning life lessons.
You see - I always dabbled in code, small projects, websites, and owned a print/media company from the age of 22 or so until I was 34. I was always buying the latest gear - digital press, large format printers, getting into CNC - with the goal of providing big value services at affordable rates as I templated almost everything. For example - my printshop was a blend of Fast Food menu meets Tattoo shop. Pick your size, template design, material, and so on - it was fast and efficient. At one point I was bringing in 6 figures a month with a small # of employees. Pretty good for my area and age. Some things happened as they do and I needed a change.
I had knowledge of 3D models, video, graphic design, coding, print, and a few other things as most creative entrepreneurs seem to develop skillsets from necessity... so I decided to merge all my skills and go full tilt in AR - and have been in it for a decade now.
It started with a company called Augmented Marketing - where my goal was to be a guru of software stacks - of which there were a few without going into names - and either consult or build to suit for clients.
Pricing was scattered, SDK's were buggy, some only worked for iOS, some Android, some both... a few for Windows Phones (yeap) and eventually Blackberry allowed sideloading of android apps, which appeased brokers... for some reason... if the app was not available for most real estate agents/brokers...they didn't want to buy in, regardless of the fact that their reach was most likely using Android/iOS - but hey - that was selling apps... and Augmented Reality ones at that. I quickly found that it just didn't scale in terms of compiling/submitting/merging SDK's for different features/etc - then I found Metaio.
It was like almost everything I could want at the time. I loved it so much that by the beginning of 2015, I was one of the top 2-3 (as we bounced back and forth) contributors to the forum/helpdesk (I was kind of addicted to the point system, admittedly). I was giving away ideas, code snippets, tutorials, whatever I could to be perceived as an expert.
I soon became a software evangelist and did a few webinars to teach agencies and brands best practices for AR leveraging the Metaio Stack... I became a preferred Developer where I was being passed client work that they were doing and became a 3D store partner with them with another partnership I forged from a talented 3D Animator/Designer in Australia. We created a collection of AR 3D clipART that was built to work already optimized for the Metaio SDK - it was an e-comm store with affordable accent pieces from seasonal to call to action buttons (3D was really scattered at that time - still is - so this was VERY much needed. Thankfully fast forward to now and our awesome WorldCAST partner, Sketchfab, has a lot of that figured out, thankfully).
Enter Mid-May 2015 - This is where it all goes to hell! (For me and countless others)
Apple buys Metaio and shuts it all down. I found out when I landed in San Francisco as I had traveled there to give a Keynote at InsideAR on the democratization of AR.
I kind of reeled for a year as projects I had going on had to be stopped as we had until December 31st to that year to stop using the stack and the cloud servers were being shut down. I had to give back down payments etc on $100k+ jobs and I know of others that were scrambling as well. Eventually, ARCore and ARkit would be released, and with my knowledge of Project Tango I was able to easily get into ideation mode and we created some powerhouse demos (for the time) that we bootstrapped via projects. We gained some exposure which I'll get into another day.
Some ideation examples from 2016-2018:
Commercial App December 2018:
Game Concept 2018:
Getting to present day... soon.
I'd been building a CMS for AR that was app-based with a proprietary structure and to have a focus on a unified portal for geo/marker/markerless. Now others had tried but just like everybody back in the early days - one would have a feature and another would have yet another feature... but nobody seemed to have a full-stack/solution that I thought was viable/scalable. I doubled down and decided to drop all app builds entirely as I was done selling the ever-changing future of features. It had been too many years of promise after promise of releasing tools for creators that were easy in a WYSIWYG way and the promise of hardware being adopted. I took 7 years of metrics on what the majority of success stories were from our past projects and all the feedback...yes... I listen...contrary to the belief of some in my family, and perhaps at the office... we took years of builds and figuring out Web Assembly etc - we were able to create a very robust engine with a very custom backend with e-comm, load balancing, global CDN nodes, and just a lot more - all thanks to our cloud partnership with IBM.
The app prototype from 2017 of what is now portal.worldcast.io:
With Investment, passion, and a lot of late nights over the years and still to this day (Below: a team member took this snap of me one morning - haha) We were able to create a platform as a service for the average person and small agency - from students/teachers to realtors/small business.
The guilty party - Nelson - one of our valued team members:
The Present
We created WorldCAST with a Freemium/Premium/Agency Plan with a co-branding option. No complicated pricing matrix, no code, and supported on a multitude of devices via the mobile browser for consumption and desktop browser for creation. No software to DL or dev environment to set up. No need for knowledge of Javascript, HTML, or CSS.
Do we have every feature - no.
Why?
I firmly believe the path to democratize is in the foundation of web services for creating interactive content cross-platform and consumption of created content cross-platform.
We are purposefully holding back on years of innovation in some ways until it makes sense on as many devices as possible. Planar Segmentation for floors like our FloorCAST ( built and ready for web when it makes sense ). Lidar/ToF - when the time is right... again, our system is for the people - not the developer. It's to enhance print (PrintCAST)/location (GeoCAST) with augmented information and to display really great looking models at absolute scale - not relative in ShowCAST.
No high prices with per view pricing models (we are unlimited - except for Freemium which is 1000 views a month).
No having to learn to code or hire a dev team.
Use the content tools you already know or easily hire talent:
Look - I'm all for job creation but I'd like to get to the point where we can hire all the devs NOT being used =) and keep building tools that make sense in utility and modules that make sense at scale.
We are here to disrupt - I called our company of 10 KP9 Interactive because a KP9 is the strongest geomagnetic storm index - it would encapsulate the earth in beautiful Auroras, disrupting everything with a beautiful experience.
This is from where I live in Ontario (I'm a hobby landscape photographer to get away from it all):
This is why I did what I did the way I did it - To create an agnostic creation/delivery tool for all - for now - and for the future.
We are not new to the game. We are here to play.
The Future
We are working with hardware partners for the long goals and we will be releasing many free utilities and keep on improving our engine.
We see a future where content created on our platform can CAST to Volumetric Displays, Glasses, HMD's, windshields - the World.
Please follow me, KP9 Interactive (Software Company), or WorldCAST (our platform) to see what we are up to - and most of all - watch for the KP9. Real people building real things for other real people - putting ideas onto reality.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/worldcastar/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WorldCastAR
Twitter: https://twitter.com/worldcastar
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilmcreynolds/
Oh - and one more thing:
Here is an under 10-minute tutorial real-time on how to create an interactive business card with no code in WebAR in PrintCAST. It's based on our $10 Premium package - the only difference between this and Freemium is Freemium would only allow for 1 video and 1000 views per month - and it does not take hours, unlike some solutions - it generally takes a few minutes from beginning to end once you get familiar with the studios.
I look forward to seeing what you all create!
Wil
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