HITS

Technology that Vancouver-based Kaleidoco developed is taking augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) to a new level, according to Cassandra Rosenthal, the company’s co-founder and co-CEO.

“Transmedia and Web3 transmedia is really the stepping stone into the metaverse…. That’s where we’re going,” she said May 19 at the Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS), during the Metaverse session “Particle Ink Metaverse: A New Era at TED Conference 2022.”

The session dug deep into the first-ever, location-based MR experience to synchronize thousands of devices for a LIVE experience.

Particle Ink created a MR universe, bringing to life interactive adventures in both virtual and physical venues. The pioneering broadcast used Unity’s emerging technology to add an AR layer for TV viewers.

The Kaleidoco platform “enables the creation of meaningful and purpose-driven experiences through entertainment, education, retail, gaming, with capacity for expansion across verticals,” according to the company.

Kaleidoco is “very AR-driven because we really believe in the metaverse being alive in the real world,” Rosenthal told attendees, noting that’s where she wants to see fictional characters come to life, so to speak, and interact with humans.

The technology made its public debut at the TED2022 Conference in April, where Kaleidoco described Particle Ink as a “metaverse made of light set within the 2.5^th Dimension.”

The company used Web3 technology to merge its proprietary AR technology with MR storytelling to “create a more meaningful, productive, empathetic, and accessible metaverse, “ it said.

At TED2022, Kaleidoco presented its previously “never-before-seen multi-viewer AR technology where every person simultaneously experienced AR, projection mapping and live performance seamlessly woven together,” it said.

Attendees at that event were given a glimpse into Particle Ink’s 2.5th dimension, where the lines between the digital and physical worlds disappeared within a living graphic novel, a world the company said was created with light and ink on paper.

Particle Ink: The Speed of Dark, the company’s “first ongoing portal into the 2.5th,” opened May 4 in the Las Vegas, Nevada art district with performances Wednesday through Sunday at 7PM and 9PM, it said.

“There will be many portals around the world,” according to Rosenthal, who compared them to the world of the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis during the HITS session.

“The next stage of that is what we call augmented unification, which is another proprietary technology that we ‘ve developed,” she told HITS attendees, noting it creates “true” artificial intelligence characters. The tech detects objects using a camera, then ascribes relevant attributes from a proprietary machine learning database, according to the company.

Sinan AlRubaye, chief experience officer at Los Angeles, California-based software development studio ICVR, moderated the panel, which also included Ihar Heneralau, co-founder and CEO of ICVR.

To view the entire presentation, click here.

The Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit event was produced by MESA in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), Media & Entertainment Data Center Alliance (MEDCA), presented by ICVR and sponsored by Genpact, MicroStrategy, Whip Media, Convergent Risks, Perforce, Richey May Technology Solutions, Signiant, Softtek, Bluescape, Databricks, KeyCode Media, Metal Toad, Shift, Zendesk, EIDR, Fortinet, Arch Platform Technologies and Amazon Studios.