If you are into 3D this will be for you!
Our recent visit to VR World Expo 2018 yielded little to talk about, possibly as a result of the limited amount of exhibitors. There were gaming applications, engineering and medical applications with haptic feedback robotics, etc. While many of these applications have advanced a lot over the past few years and now offer global teamwork options in a virtual space, etc. new retail applications have been far a wide between.
One company stood out from the rest though:
Astrivis
Astrivis is a 2 year old startup from Switzerland which started as an exam project.
In brief, the software allow you to take a 3D image of at item or a space. We were shown a quick demo of how it works and were amazed with the speed of creating the mesh, that you dont have to hold the camera at a steady level but can move this around as you wish to get the 3D mesh. Once you are happy with the mesh model you can render the model. The rendering is very very quick.
We can see several potential uses of this technology in retail. For example, imagine you can now take a 3D impression of your store (not a 3D image) and use this for a number of purposes - allowing your customers to have a look inside your store in 3D and perhaps also as a way to record layouts and interiors for future use in your business intelligence systems.
Astrivis has managed to sign up a licensing deal already with a hardware supplier and has been bootstrapped up to now. The initial idea was hatched in 2012 but as part of a university project. The company has been building the product commercially over the last 2 years.