What is the essence of Arcona project?
Arcona is a global augmented reality metaverse, where thousands of developers, 3D artists, businessmen and enthusiasts of this breakthrough technology can communicate and create joint projects. The system is based on the unique technological platform Arcona, which automatically generates a layer of augmented reality anywhere on the planet. In this layer - on the Digital Land - a huge number of different AR projects can operate simultaneously. These are games, historical reconstructions, educational projects and tourist attractions. The formation of such a large-scale ecosystem makes AR technology truly in demand, massive and accessible to all.
What is augmented reality?
Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that superimposes any digital content -3D and 2D models, photos, video holograms, anything. The possibilities of AR at the moment are limited only by the capabilities of your mobile devices.
How is AR different from virtual reality?
VR (virtual reality) completely blocks out the real world and immerses the user in a digital environment.
What is a Metaverse?
It is a collective digital space that is closely connected to our physical world. Here millions of people can interact virtually in all sorts of ways. And games are only a small part of the life of the metacommunity. It's where businesses are built, art is made, media is produced. In fact, everything we do in the real world, but on a new technological level.
What is revolutionary about Arcona?
Arcona was created to streamline the production of AR projects and make the technology really accessible and understandable for everyone. This is the only AR platform, which is not oriented on professional developers. Any regular user, far from programming, can create their own AR projects here. It's as simple and fun as adding articles to Wikipedia or design a personal page on Facebook. And these projects can be seen by thousands of people in different cities of the planet.
How is Arcona different from other augmented reality platforms?
The Arcona platform is primarily designed for the remote placement and management of 3D content. It allows creating AR projects in any part of the world, and dramatically reduce the cost of implementation and maintenance of each of them. So, being in your own city, you can easily install your author's installations on another continent and show them to thousands of users.
Who does Arcona work for?
For the creators of AR projects it offers very simple tools to realize their ideas. For developers it is a convenient platform for testing new solutions and bringing them to market. Businessmen find it a good way to make money on AR or promote their projects using AR technology. And numerous Arcona users will be able to see and evaluate the latest ideas in the field of augmented reality thanks to the platform's universal viewer, compatible with most mobile devices.
Arcona XR Metaverse developers
The creators of Arcona are Piligrim XXI. We started working with AR back in 2013, and we were one of the first to enter the international AR market for tourism. We have deployed a whole network of AR parks in Europe and Russia. These are full-scale virtual open-air museums with historical reconstructions, animation of events, audio guides, and gamification. Among other things, they recreated the Forum in Pompeii, the seizure of the Bastille, the Battle of Narva, the Road of Life at Ladoga.
The company went through several investment rounds. Among the investors was the St. Petersburg Pre-Season Investment Fund (Russia). The company's technological development was financed by a pool of investors from Spain.
Piligrim XXI is the resident of Skolkovo Innovation Center, finalist of Generation S, winner of Web Ready, Startup Village, Unicorn Battle world series of startup competitions from Russia, Russian-Chinese competition of entrepreneurs in Nanjing and others. The company has received the highest rating (AAA) from Russian Startup Rating, entered the TOP 10 world startups at the exhibition Future en Seine (Paris), received grants from the Bortnik Foundation, INTEL Microsoft Seed Fund. The team was accelerated by Intel, Google, Faber Novel.
The trademarks of Arcona and its main asset - Digital Lands - are registered in Russia, EU countries, China and Japan.
The permanent team consists of 10 people. They are specialists in computer vision, SLAM, mobile development, blockchain, GIS and 3D artists.
How did the idea for the project come about?
Our team has been engaged in the development of AR technology since 2013. At that time there was no Pokemon GO, ARKit and ARCore had not yet been invented, and smartphones barely supported AR applications. But even then we saw what incredible opportunities this technology presented to us. And we assembled a team of very strong developers to create fundamentally new, breakthrough projects in augmented reality.
We started as digital archaeologists, restoring lost architectural monuments and recreating events of the past. Our team deployed a whole network of tourist AR parks across Europe. They are full-fledged digital open-air museums. Users not only see how some buildings looked like many years ago, but can also immerse themselves in the atmosphere of that era. For example, to witness the eruption of Vesuvius in Pompeii, to observe ancient Byzantine rituals in Bulgaria, or to become a participant in the Northern War in Estonia.
Every such project could be used both in augmented and virtual reality. There are no analogues of our works in the world today. The smartphone here plays the role of a pocket time machine.
But it was too expensive and time-consuming to create each such park. Endless business trips all over Europe, scanning the terrain, making technical adjustments. Such projects are interesting for the user, but not profitable from a commercial point of view. Thus the idea to develop algorithms for remote working in AR was born. Our programmers invented everything from scratch. At first, just to make our job easier, but then we realized that we could use our technology to create a whole metaverse for users, and then augmented reality would not only appear in a few places on the world map, but across the entire planet. This is how the Arcona XR Metaverse was born.
What stage is the project at today?
The world of Arcona XR Metaverse is actively shaping. We already have about 30,000 users worldwide, including Digital Land owners, mobile app users, and Arcona token holders.
Digital Lands has completely covered the entire planet and every site is populated with interactive content. The AR content of Arcona is placed evenly over the whole Land, and any app user can immerse himself in the AR world in his own city.
Now various Play2Earn projects have been launched for users. This "Treasure Hunt" and the first stage of the global game "Castles and Dragons" with elements of PvP, PvE, farming and support for NFT.
The first stage of large-scale tourist project - Creative Space in Petrozavodsk - is realized on the Arcona land. We fill the whole city with the most incredible art objects in augmented reality. There will be everything: reconstructions of architectural monuments, animated city sculptures, interactive AR-quests and immersive advertising. In a word, an alternative city will grow here, which will live in two realities at once.
Preparation for the launch of several partnership projects has begun.
Active Arcona users can easily create their own virtual scenes anywhere in the world. And we can already see the first experiments.
While the system is only gaining momentum, we are very attentive to the ideas and wishes of our users: we help with content creation, scenario development and promotion of their ideas.
Benefits of Arcona XR Metaverse
- The only AR platform that allows users to run AR projects without hiring professional developers.
- The technology of remote positioning of 3D objects allows halving the cost of creating AR projects, and the launch time (with ready-made content) is reduced to 1 hour.
- Opportunities to develop and promote almost any business with the help of visualization technologies (advertising, real estate, online-retail games, tourism, education, etc.). In this case the copyrights and financial interests are protected with the blockchain technology.
- Possibility to place interactive content in any part of the world directly from your workplace, which makes it easier for small companies to enter international markets
- Own technology stack, established team of developers and nine years of experience in the AR market.
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