Mollejuo's blog about technology, augmented reality and entrepreneurship

Scavenger hunt in AR

One of the natural uses for geolocated in augmented reality (AR) is doing an scavenger hunt activity of some sort. While obvious, we have thought about the idea for a long time. That, until Jessie connected us about doing something together. And so we did …

Enter the games!

Given her wide experience on travel and foodie trips, we decided to made an AR scavenger hunt for foodies. The way we did it was by enabling within Terra Icons, a layer for Jessie on a journey active on New York city. This layer contains NYC Brooklyn’s neat restaurants. The first 5 restaurants […] Read more

Local Businesses presence in geo AR

Since the day we started working on AR, one of the way we envisioned it’s potential was by business being present on the medium (geo AR). Geo AR it’s not the only use case of this technology, however we believe is the strongest one as it’s base on functionality rather than entertainment (nothing wrong with entertainment though).

Lately we have been working with our partner of Bluepoints, they offer a nice product. To enhance this offer we out those business also in geo AR, so people can find them better.

Bluepoints business are present -at the moment- in the Metro layer only […] Read more

To ease Uber entry, make it electric only

Many of us have seen or witness the worldwide battle between Uber and taxi drivers. Long history short, taxi drivers are defending their livelihood, while Uber represents the new way of working. The thing is, taxi services around the world are regulated by cities. So, in order to operate a taxi, the owner of it must pay the city a fee, which in some cities (like here in Montreal) could cost thousand of dollars. As such, taxis companies/drivers have a lot of leverage towards city mayors, and -obviously- have no interest in changing the status quo.

If a city wants to […] Read more

The stealth battle for 360 video VR domination

Virtual Reality has always been about generating virtual environments for its user. 360 Cinema has been around for decades, however VR was all about generating graphics for it. When Facebook purchase of Oculus made commercial VR a probable success, it was natural to try to put 360 video on the future Oculus platform.

On the side of Google, they were playing around with the idea of VR with Cardboard, also making it natural to play video with it. However, there were no 360 videos in Youtube, because there was no hardware to display it. So the chicken and egg cycle was […] Read more

To web host? or to Cloud? That is the question

Frequently I stumble with customers that are torn, or don’t know whether to host their project on the cloud or with a web hosting. So with the objective of clarifying which path to follow, lets compare those two worlds. The following will try to help non technical people and developers alike, while they don’t speak the same language, they both need each other, specially when starting a new project.

The Cloud

While the cloud is very popular today, let start by defining it, which is quite simple. In the beginning on the networking world, every other equipment that it wasn’t in your […] Read more

HoloLens vs Meta 2: Mano a mano!

Meta just released their Meta 2 glasses. In case you’re not aware of Meta, they’re one of the pioneers of AR glasses, pushing the concept before HoloLens, back in the day of Google Glass. In fact, you can say HoloLens took many of the features of Meta 1 glasses and improved over them. Likewise, Meta has done the same with Meta 2. Meta is a cool company which had a very cool ranch as a headquarters. Unfortunately, it appears that the company has outgrown the ranch’s concept, forcing them to move to a more standard offices on the bay area.

Anyway, […] Read more

AR vs. VR? or not?

Which is which?

VR it’s on the mainstream, and maybe because it shares one initial (R) with AR, it tends to be confused with, as if both do the same or similar things. The only similarity between the two is that both mess up with reality, however in different ways. Maybe that’s why there’s confusion. Lets clear of these nebulous concepts so you can be certain about which one does what.

As it name implies VR (virtual reality) it’s based on a virtual world, where as AR (augmented reality) enhances the real world. Clear? Not yet? The key here is what the […] Read more

Big data & geolocated AR

As you may or not know, our geo AR platform (Terra Icons) is based on displaying point of interest (POI) in cities by way of using augmented reality. Terra Icons currently covers 70 cities around the world concentrated in 4 services (layers) to display within the mobile app:

Icons: landmarks of the city, like monuments, museums, buildings, etc.
Bike station location: If you live in a city which has shared biking services, you’ll know those parking stations are spread out all over the city, as they should
Metro-Subway: Metro/subway stations location
Carsharing: The location of parking lots for carsharing services. Currently only Paris, and […] Read more

The superiority of PlayStation VR

Like several times before, we were volunteers for this year Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS). A great event! this event allows us to keep up to date with the latest trends within the game industry. This year the star was VR, which was all round. Minority media had a booth on which they showed their VR demos. Minority it’s a local (Montreal) game studio focused on creating VR experiences, his CEO (Vander Caballero) made a bold prediction during the MIGS:

The killer app for VR won’t be a shooting game, and that’s a good thing

Caballero doesn’t have an agenda against shooters, […] Read more

The AR challenges of a limiting field of view

When Microsoft first showed the world HoloLens, it wowed the world with all the things it could do (display). As time passed, Microsoft has wisely kept expectations real and it has said that the device will be focused first on industrial applications (as to work with like Autocad and related) and later for gaming. Microsoft is disclosing this not because they like to go against their marketing message, it’s because if they don’t do this today, later the market will punish them. Specifically, the limitation lies around the field of view, on which is much smaller in real life than […] Read more