Pengram

Pengram started as a side-project with some friends to build a framework to unify VR, AR and mobile for collaborative applications. When industrial manufacturing giants like StateGrid and Siemmens visited our lab to voice a need for enterprise remote collaboration tools, we decided to turn Pengram into a commercial service. Backed by The House and funded by the SkyDeck accelerator, Pengram works with customers across continents for remote troubleshooting, training and maintenance in industrial plants.

1. It's not uncommon to hear that VR and AR have the potential to connect people in new, exciting ways. Imagine shared virtual music festivals and sporting events and massive-multiplayer video games, filled with strangers and friends. However, the vast majority of virtual experiences available today are disconnected and isolating. Why is that? As developers, we realized that the current landscape is too fragmented at the hardware and software level, making it difficult to develop truly cross-platform applications. Additionally, although there's a lot in common between AR and VR, there's been little work done in unifying systems across them. Here's what the interoperability between the most popular developer frameworks looks like today:
   With Pengram, we set out to develop a system that could run as seamlessly on an Oculus Rift or a GearVr as it could on a Hololens or iPhone.
2. Look at what's holding back VR commercially: expensive hardware, unrefined content (compared to the highly-polished games and movies on traditional media), and small platform-locked content libraries. These three factors create a chicken-and-egg problem that decentivizes developers, headset manufacturers, and consumers. If you look at industrial manufacturing, none of these problems exist. Equipment budgets eclipse hardware costs by orders of magnitude, content libaries aren't needed, and the alternative (thousand page booklets or low-fidelity Skype calls) are significantly worse. This led us to strongly believe that , at least in the current ecosystem, the industrial setting is where VR/AR can immediately provide a lot of value.
Key Features of the Platform

• Cross-platform. The application logic is abstracted away from the hardware by our custom middleware layer. That means that adding support for new hardware is as simple as writing connectors from their Unity API to our middleware. That's important because it means that we are flexible to new technology breakthroughs (eye-tracking, hand-tracking) and new hardware platforms (like MagicLeap).

• Bridges AR and VR. The user-interface is the same for AR and VR, even though the input mechanisms might not be. We used custom camera based hand-tracking to replace functionality on platforms where tracked controllers are not available, and Vuforia-powered object recognition to anchor shared holograms in the real world.

• Spatially Aware. Uses computer vision techniques to identify objects in the real world, and anchor virtual objects to them. This allows annotations to stay in place even as the users move around, and allows users in virtual reality, augmented reality, and the real reality to perfectly sync up their views of the scene.

• Extensible. There's built-in support for drawing, 2D and 3D geometric primitives, common tools, and video and voice chat. Users can upload their own 3D objects to an asset server to spawn them in the virtual world. By tagging an asset with an image marker, they can be tracked in the real-world too.

• Security. Users log in to a mobile app that automatically pairs with the headset. Not only does this assure authenticity, but it also solves the problem of text-input in VR.

Here's what it looks like in action.