Dekko is attempting to create a world comparable to the one in The Matrix with the help of real people.
Matt Miesnieks has launched an augmented reality project reliant on crowdsourcing in order to help his company, Dekko, to re-create as much of the world as possible, including some of its finest little details, in a digital form.
The hope is to take advantage of every possible camera and turn it into a scanner for the project.
According to Miesnieks, “In effect what we’re doing is taking every camera — in Glass or in smartphones – turning them in 3D scanners, and then taking all of those images to build a 3D model of the world.” Though this may appear to be a daunting project, to say the least, the Dekks team feels that it has what it takes to make it happen.
The team is highly experienced in technology and augmented reality and has learned from this experience.
Both Mike Miesnieks and his wife, Silka, who is the cofounder of Dekks, are Layar veterans. That augmented reality company was able to ride a considerable wave for the technology while it was still brand new. According to the couple, they have learned a tremendous amount from their time with that company, particularly that the traditional form of AR technology has been, in essence, a failure, so far.
He explained that “If the app works on one page of a magazine but not the next, people might use it once, but they’re going to toss it away.” From the standpoint of the experience for users, augmented reality may not, therefore, have lived up to the hype that has surrounded it.
The digitization process from Dekko is still considered to be somewhat on the rough side, but the couple says that this will lead to a rapid improvement. They have decided that instead of creating an augmented reality platform on the weak capability of a camera to be able to recognize the tremendous variety of different kinds of object that are found throughout the world, they are eliminating the entire concept of recognition.
Instead, the new augmented reality experience that is Dekko’s goal, is an entirely digitized world.
