If you spend enough time watching other people's seemingly "perfect" lives on Social Media, you may realize that the false image of the online world has started to seem much more realistic.
That may be why so many investors are starting to turn to the world of avatars and digital influencers, who aren't real people but can learn from their audience in real time. The Artie is one of them, essentially trying to create an interaction engine so that digital avatars can enter the real world and have some meaningful interaction with users through AR.
Artie's backers include Founders Fund and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. Co-founders Armando Kirwin and Ryan Horrigan come from leading media startups.
Artie's standalone platform focuses on certain emerging trends.
One is the idea of digital influencers emerging in Japan and Korea, which essentially takes advantage of all the new facial recognition capabilities of smartphones, allowing users to create 3D avatars that are a kind of animated, online personalities. Artie isn’t necessarily looking at user-generated content right now, but the company’s work on more branded content with already proven IP is an interesting first step towards something bigger.
Artie is also an AR company. The AR market still seems to have some hurdles to overcome. There are a few companies trying to build some more fundamental capabilities to enable shared experiences that adapt to their environment, but it’s unclear how the missing link is really going to be to convince people to use a feature that’s just sitting idle on their smartphone.
The company is working with WebXR standards that essentially allow someone to tap a link on their phone and be immersed directly into an experience where the avatar is within their physical space.
Even though this idea sounds a bit strange, Artie isn't the only one who's shown interest, as Google has come very close to this with the launch of Playground on its Pixel smartphones, where users can find themselves in photos with 3D characters interacting with their surroundings. For Artie, the deeper interactions between the avatar and the characters are what he really hopes will bring the magic to the fore.
The co-founders share the same big ideas about technology that harnesses deep learning to show content creators more about the world and the audience they create for. Artie is at the forefront of some interesting but rather strange market trends, which are likely driven by both pop culture and technological capabilities, even though it is a completely new technology coming from a small team.
The founders say they will start working with some former “power users” like media companies and celebrities from the first quarter of next year to start creating the first experiences for their machine, which will be called “Wonderfriend.”.
