Before everything went online, content was still a buzzword. Before WordPress made it easy to build a website, in the early Web days, content was still being created and pushed out. Marketing has been around for as long as someone has tried to sell something, and people have always paid a lot of money to keep this system in play. When content went digital and online and when social media grew into the behemoth we see today, digital content went into every format, every “.xyz” file type available. Every marketing firm in America told clients, influencers, startups, and corporations to get on every platform and push their content in every direction. This strategy matched the level of organization and universal structure these platforms held. Tech startups today are foreseeing this cycle in the future and attempting to jump ahead of the chaos.

Fad or Future?

With the rise of AR, VR and 3-D, we’ve noticed that plenty of businesses wrote off this technology as a fad, rather than leaning into the importance of the 3-D assets of their products. We’ve heard that before though–because adoption takes time, and technology needs to be scalable before there’s any kind of mentionable widespread foothold. This slower approach is understandable because businesses, regardless of size, are responsible to answer for the directions they take their internal processes. A wrong turn, in today’s tumultuous and accelerated business marketplace, often spells disaster, especially when the development times and return on investment seem to show up in slow motion.

While it’s exciting to see new startups and even large brands put new tech gear on the market, the shift that is happening now is representative of what will actually work–and that is AR overtaking VR because the development of AR is happening for mobile applications and current file conversions, and it offers a clearer line to use cases across multiple industries. VR might be mainstream, but AR is global, with a global market valuation of over $3 billion by 2021. This industrial revolution we are experiencing will see digital transformation in the manufacturing industry, and AR software could be the technology to make it happen. I love to see businesses like Vntana recognize the shifts and gaps and work towards solutions, rather than just floating out new exciting hardware.

Ownership of Assets

Ashley Crowder, CEO and co-founder of Vntana–an industry leader in holograms and 3-D asset conversion–started in this industry in the hardware space. With a background in engineering, she set out with her co-founder to create holographic experiential marketing campaigns. Along the way, it became absolutely obvious that the real issue they would have to tackle was the lack of ownership around 3-D assets and data. Their clients just didn’t have the 3-D assets required for AR, VR, and holographic content. Crowder realized the company would have to design a way to distribute these assets in a universal way. This is the new requirement for this spatial computing world we live in. Crowder also knew it needed to be scalable, affordable, interactive, and accessible. The widespread application needs to make sense across industries and across platforms.

Goal 1: Put the owner back in control of their content, renderings, and access. So much of this is outsourced, it’s chaos, and a lot of businesses have no idea how to access their digital assets, where they are, or what their format is and where that format works. Vntana is solving for this by launching a one-stop shop where owners can upload what they have, the Vntana software will improve it, and then it can be converted into any supported format needed.

Goal 2: Educating the masses on possibilities, access, and data to create options for long-term sustainable content management. Data and digital content is a currency, and right now, we are not managing these well. Even when we work with a consultant or producer like Vntana, we still own these assets and should act accordingly. Any other asset of this size or value we would have under lock and key.