Ron Burgundy is in the White House. No, that’s not the plot to “Anchorman 4,” but the work of Dmitry Shapiro, founder and CEO of San Diego-basedaugmented reality startup GoMeta. Shapiro placed a virtual version of the notorious news anchor in the Oval Office when he recently demoed his app to Variety. Now, anyone visiting the President of the United States just has to open theMetaverse app to discover Burgundy, ready to talk nonsense.
Metaverse is an app that works similar to Pokemon Go in that it lets users discover characters ranging from Burgundy to talking aliens in the real world simply by going to places and pointing their phone camera at the world around them. But unlike Pokemon Go, Metaverse wants to be more than a game. Shapiro’s ambitious plan is to allow anyone to build their own phone-based augmented reality experiences.
“Malls could be learning experiences for children,” he said, painting a picture of math problems lurking around every corner as part of a gigantic educational treasure hunt. People will be able to use Metaverse to annotate the real world, turn their morning walk into an augmented reality fitness parkour, collaborate on maps of public restrooms, or even build their own Pokemon Go clones based on their favorite characters. “Get ready for the long tail of interactive,” he said.
This isn’t the first time that Shapiro is trying to empower the long tail. Back in 2005, Dmitry Shapiro was one of the early pioneers of online video. Shapiro’s site Veoh debuted a few months after YouTube with pretty much the same idea, allowing anyone and everyone to upload their own videos and present them to a global audience. “When you allow everyone to publish, magical things happen,” Shaprio recalled during a recent interview.
In Veoh’s case, a few bad things happened as well: In 2007, Universal Music sued Veoh for copyright infringement. The label lost the drawn-out court case in 2013, but mounting legal costs had forced Veoh into bankruptcy in 2010, leading to a fire sale. Shapiro went on to work for Myspace and then Google. Now, he’s back to once again power self-publishing — only this time, he isn’t empowering people to create and distribute videos, but augmented reality experiences.
GoMeta first launched its Metaverse app in October, and has since gradually given a small but growing number of users access to features that allow them to build their own augmented reality experiences. The easiest way to do so is via the mobile app’s experience builder, which basically allows users to leave virtual objects or characters where ever they are.
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Source: Variety