Metaio opens new office to ramp up augmented reality hardware R&D

At this year's Mobile World Congress, Metaio announced the AREngine, reputed to be the first-ever hardware IP dedicated to accelerating new Augmented Reality hardware interfaces, such as Google Glass.

Metaio and its network of clients and developers already benefit from an award-winning R&D team in its headquarters in Munich, Germany. As an expansion to the existing research efforts, the opening of the brand-new office in Dallas, Texas, will focus entirely on advancements and platform research in order to engineer the next generation of Augmented Reality software and devices.

Metaio has long been involved in collaborative research projects with partners in the mobile handset industry and will continue these strategic developments in designing hardware that will bring Augmented Reality into the future.

"Optimising the software helps, but it's not enough," said Metaio CTO Peter Meier. "In order to enable the kind of 'Always On, Always Augmented' future that every popular representation of Augmented Reality from Iron Man to Google Glass promises, the devices themselves need to be optimised at the chipset level."

Augmented Reality experiences running on standard mobile devices tax the battery and the CPU heavily. Early research by Metaio already shows a drastic reduction in power consumption and increases in initialisation speed by up to a factor of 60 when running on the AREngine. These types of performance improvements are absolutely necessary to enable everyday use of this incredible technology.

Metaio has grown substantially since expanding to the US and is hiring for multiple positions, including chipset R&D. Learn more at www.metaio.com/career.