Will Augmented Reality Shut Down Shopping Malls?

A former Air Force intel officer turned his experience building secure facilities in Guam into an Augmented Reality app that’s changing the way furniture makers sell their products. 

The challenge that Pair founder and CEO Andrew Kemendo (left) faced building facilities where military personnel could process classified information was having a tool to evaluate the designs. So with the programming skills he had picked up in high school, Andrew used an iPad, Augmented Reality technology and the 3D models the contractors were providing for the project to build a demo app. 

He didn’t have enough time to actually use it, but he held onto the idea after coming back to DC in 2012. A few months later, Andrew and co-founder Taylor Clark (right) created Visidraft for architects. It allowed them to load the app with 3D models of a project and walk around to get a feel for the space. 

After signing up thousands of users and getting featured in glossy architecture magazines, they left their full-time jobs. Soon companies started asking the team for a white label version of the product for other uses and they realized they were onto something bigger.

So the team, which has raised $500k in angel funding, started building a large online catalog of furniture with items from designers like Herman Miller and retailers like Ikea. A user scrolls through the 400-item catalog and finds a chair they might be interested in. It loads into the camera view of their phone, allowing the user to drag and drop that piece of furniture into their space. The user can walk around it and see what it looks like in the space and then purchase it through the platform. “We see ourselves as the new shopping mall,” he adds. 

Some of the manufacturers and designers on the site pay a flat monthly fee—much like rent in a shopping center; others pay every time someone loads a product into their space.

There’s potential to broaden the product to things like seeing the inside of a Tesla. Andrew says the four-person company has already begun research into developing its own Augmented Reality hardware. The challenge is finding people who have skills required for building AR applications, including 3D rendering technology and computer vision technology.