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Aussie startup invests big in immersive tech to realize the promise of the metaverse

For a concept no one seems confident to define, the metaverse is proving incredibly costly, with McKinsey estimating in June more than US$177 billion had been sunk into it since 2021.

Many of those investments will never see a return. But for those organizations who invest wisely, there is always the hope that the upsides will be significant. This is certainly the hope of Trent Clews-de Castella and his team at a Melbourne-based immersive technology startup, Phoria.

The company was recently called into the spotlight by Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, at the Meta Connect conference, which showcased Phoria’s Spatial Fusion, an extended reality (XR) platform that merges digital information into the real world and can run in a standard browser without specialist headsets or other technology.

“We created it as a showcase to demonstrate to brands what’s now possible in this XR space,” Clews-de Castella tells CMO. “When you build something over the immersive Web, you can actually reach many devices and surfaces, not just a VR headset.”

While concepts behind XR, such as augmented reality (AR) overlays, have been in existence for some time, Clews-de Castella says what makes them relevant now is improvements in the technology that underpins them, and the broader understanding among marketers they can be used for more than just advertising purposes.

“Content software is evolving to be more experiential, and so with that you can imagine a lot of brands can extend beyond the screen and create campaigns and messages and product interactions that ultimately just feel more real,” Clews-de Castella. “What we have built with Spatial Fusion is really just a sign of things to come. The kind of paradigm we are shifting through now is that if you can see ‘it’ in mixed reality, in your space, at scale, in first- person, then it is going to feel more realistic and contextual.

“That is what we keep coming back to with mixed reality – context. It is a connection to the product or the place you are in, in a way that drives a sense of presence and a realistic lived experience.”

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