When it comes to augmented and virtual reality, Ed Barton has been there and got the T-shirt. His Brighton-based startup Curiscope produces The Virtuali-Tee, a garment printed with a stylised QR code that resembles a rib cage. Hover your phone over it, and using its app, you can explore the human chest cavity and peer at the heart, lungs and veins. "We use a mix of VR and AR to see inside the anatomy," explains Barton, 28. "With positionally tracked AR, you can position VR experiences physically within your environment." Curiscope has sold more than 3,000 Virtuali-Tees. Barton (pictured) and co-founder Ben Kidd have raised almost $1 million (£780,000) in seed funding from LocalGlobe.
When the pair founded the company in 2015, they began making 360° YouTube videos. Their first upload in January 2016, featuring a shark dive, became one of the site's most-watched VR videos. But they felt something was missing. Surely there was more to VR than videos? For Barton, the solution was positionally tracked AR, which lets them overlay 3D imagery on to the material world. "YouTube is fantastic, but doesn't give us the scope to do transformative work with physical products," Barton says. With positional tracking, he says, "we have a blurring of physical and digital items, and an experience more tightly connected to reality". This was the birth of the Virtuali-Tee. Barton and Kidd conceived the product in March 2016 and went into production thanks to £74,000 in Kickstarter funding. "With the Virtuali-Tee, AR is your interface and VR is used to transport you somewhere else. The technologies should be merging."
Next up for Curiscope: the launch of the Great White Shark AR app, due to coincide with the autumn release of iOS 11. Barton and Kidd's book, All About Virtual Reality, is published by Dorling Kindersley and available now. And in November, the pair will launch Operation Apex, a VR experience with HTC Vive Studios in which people are placed in a virtual environment with sharks. "We began talking with Vive Studios in 2016 and realised there was a big opportunity to be at the centre of this technology," Barton says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
