Virtual and mixed reality market continues to grow even during challenging economic times. UK as one of the biggest tech hubs has a few startups, in addition to Meta, Google and Apple - as they have thousands of employees in the UK, building their next generation Virtual, Augmented and mixed reality platforms and products.
Ultraleap
Provider of spatial interaction technology solutions.
Founded Year: 2013
Location: Bristol
Funding: 190M USD
Major Investors: Tencent, Mayfair, IP Group
Ultraleap provide spatial interaction technology solutions. Offers a haptic module that enables to integrate virtual touch and an optical hand tracking module which has the capability to capture the movements of an user's hands with unparalleled accuracy and near-zero latency. Also offers TouchFree application, which enables to add touchless gesture control to interactive screens. The software application runs on an interactive kiosk or advertising totem and has the capability to detects a user’s hand in mid-air and converts it to an on-screen cursor.
nDreams
VR games development
Founded Year: 2006
Location: Farnborough
Funding: 47M USD
Investors: Mercia, Tech Nation
Developer of Indie VR games. The company develops multiple VR games. It also develops VR-based entertainment content and provides game development services for other companies.
Gravity Sketch
Provider of a 3D sketching tool for VR applications
Founded Year: 2014
Location: London
Funding: 40M USD
Investors: Accel, GV, Kindred Capital
Provider of a 3D sketching tool for VR applications. It comprises a pen and pad specifically designed for sketching in real space through the use of augmented reality glasses. The pen and the pad give the physical interaction of drawing in the digital world and by adjusting the plane the user can give volume to the sketch. The augmented reality glasses would also help visualize the product just in front of their eyes. The virtual model can be printed using a 3D printer.
Immerse
Developer of a VR platform to create and share VR experiences with multiple users.
Founded Year: 2005
Location: London
Funding: 16M USD
Investors: Erik Blachford, Trevor Fenwick, David Tomlinson
Developer of a VR platform to create and share VR experiences with multiple users. It offers an SDK-based platform compatible with Unity that provides users with tools, including a library of VR, for creating and sharing VR/3D experiences. It also allows users to import OBJ models for interacting in VR. It is compatible with VR headsets such as Oculus and Vive and Chrome browsers. The company plans to enable the platform for real-time user interaction analytics in the future. The main applications are in the areas of defense, healthcare, mining, oil and gas, satellite communication, and nuclear and renewable energy.
FitXR
Virtual reality based personalized fitness coaching platform.
Founded Year: 2016
Location: London
Funding: 11M USD
Investors: Hiro Capital, Boost VC, Maveron
FitXR provides a virtual reality-based personalized fitness coaching platform. Claims to building an ecosystem to deliver virtual reality fitness experiences that can guide, motivate and entertain. The company has launched its first product, BOXVR, a fitness game and is described as "Guitar Hero crosses with a studio boxing workout". Available on HTC Vive, Oculus, and Steam.
FundamentalVR
Provider of a virtual reality-based medical education platform.
Founded Year: 2012
Location: London
Funding: 30M USD
Investors: EQT, Downing Ventures, Downing
Provider of a virtual reality-based medical education platform. Its cloud-based platform provides surgical simulation and training solutions using haptics in a virtual environment. Its proprietary haptics system uses AI technologies and allows sensing resistance, texture, substance, and pressure, enabling professionals to practice or refine their surgical skills. Its hardware agnostic software engine claims to deliver kinesthetic force feedback haptics into a variety of handheld devices ranging from base station-held instruments to haptic gloves.
NCTech Imaging
360 degree camera for spherical immersive images.
Founded Year: 2010
Location: Edinburgh
Funding: 25M USD
Investors: Archangels, Scottish Enterprise, Eg Thomson Holdings
NCTech provides 2 products, iris360 & iSTAR, for 360 degree capture of environment. Provides software to process, color overlay for laser scan and share images captured by the cameras. Also gives and SDK to integrate cameras with third party systems and software. Their automatic 360 degree camera is approved by Google for Street View. Originally developed for military and police, their camera now is used in applications like 3D laser documentation, asset management for engineering and heritage sectors etc. Partners with 12 companies, including Google, Apple, Autodesk, Nokia. The iris360 camera, to be available from Oct'15, costs user $2K for pre-order.
This is not a complete list of all UK based startups, and market keeps growing year on year. Big tech companies continue to invest billions into Metaverse, Virtual and Augmented reality areas - demonstrating the trend and huge potential for startups in this area.
Top comments (3)
Do you think that Apple will release a device in 2023, or they will delay due to recession and hardware limitations?
According to latest updates - hardware is still biggest limitation and both Apple and Meta will probably postpone their projects for a few years
Awesome thanks for sharing this laser scanning info with us it really helped me a lot.