Google venture arm backs startup aiming to bring mixed reality to any car windshield or plane cockpit

GV, Alphabet’s venture capital division, and other investors have contributed 10 million euros ($11.1 million) to Distance Technologies, a Finnish business that hopes to integrate mixed-reality technology into any windshield or cockpit.

Distance raised the money in a seed round led by GV, according to the company’s release to Gossip News on Thursday. Two current investors, Maki.vc and FOV Ventures, also contributed money.

The Helsinki-based company Distance creates technology that it claims can transform any transparent surface into an augmented reality screen, allowing the user to see digital things in three dimensions superimposed over the panel they are seeing.

By doing this, users may fully immerse themselves in the experience without requiring bulky technology such as augmented reality glasses or mixed reality headsets, which both need the user to cover their eyes with a device.

In an interview with Gossip News earlier this week, Urho Konttori, CEO and co-founder of Distance, stated, “One of the great challenges for mixed reality is that, as long as you need to put anything on your head, it will never be straightforward or elegant as a solution.” Before that, Konttori was the chief technical officer of Varjo, another mixed-reality company based in Helsinki.

Selling into the automotive, aerospace, and defense markets is the main focus of Distance.

According to Konttori, Distance uses tracking technology to determine your gaze direction and then computes the appropriate light field to match your exact eye positions.

To enable its technology to project an image onto the areas where your eyes are focusing, Distance’s solution adds a series of optics layers on top of the majority of liquid crystal displays (LCDs).

By using this method, Distance is able to construct an additional optical layer underneath that produces a high brightness in addition to dividing the light fields into your left and right eyes.

Whether operating an F-18 fighter jet or driving a car, Distance claims that their system can produce a life-size field of vision in every situation thanks to its “unlimited” pixel depth capability.

GV, formerly known as Google Ventures, told Gossip News that it was drawn to invest in Distance because of its “potential to construct the next generation of user interfaces.” Alphabet, the parent firm of the internet search engine, is one of GV’s only limited partners.

The potential for customers to obtain this technology is something that Roni Hiranand, a principal at GV, expressed great excitement about in an interview with Gossip News regarding some of the nearer-term approaches to bring it to market in the automotive and aerospace industries.

It is difficult to commercialize mixed reality. One reason is that mixed-reality equipment is still expensive. The starting price of both Apple’s Vision Pro and Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 devices is $3,500, and their production is also not inexpensive. The Verge claims that the cost of manufacturing a new AR glasses concept gadget that Meta showed on Wednesday was $10,000 for each unit.

When Gossip News reached Meta, she did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Heads-up displays (HUDs) that display augmented reality are not a recent development in the automotive sector. For a number of years, businesses have been attempting to integrate augmented reality (AR) capabilities into automobiles; one of the first companies to do so in China was the tech behemoth Huawei.

First International Computer, Spectralics, Envisics, Futurus, CY Vision, Raythink, Denso, Bosch, Continental, and Panasonic are just a few of the display technology companies creating their own AR HUDs for automobiles.

The majority of car AR HUDs on the market today are limited to covering only a corner or the bottom half of a display. Distance Technologies’ solution, according to Chief Marketing Officer Jussi Mäkinen, can cover the complete surface of any transparent surface.

“We are driven by the software here, which is the key difference,” Mäkinen said to CNN.

At the June mixed-reality industry trade show, Augmented World Expo USA 2024, the company had previously demonstrated a proof-of-concept version of their technology.

To showcase its technology to potential partners and investors, Distance is now limited to using standard LCD panels and basic optics. In the future, Konttori stated that he is preparing to press a “very expensive” button in order to advance Distance’s optics technology early in the next year into what he terms the next generation.

The CEO of Distance stated, “I think we are currently in the research cycle.” We are moving into the product cycle at this point. The most crucial step is to collaborate with a potential client—either one or two people who you can work with—then create a finished product specification.