Mawari is a Tokyo technology start-up with a dual-compute edge technology solution which solves a major bottleneck in distribution of on-demand XR content. What we have been calling the “AR Cloud.” Mawari’s XR-enabling solution moves the 3D content rendering burdens upstream to the cloud, then streams that content in real time using a proprietary 3D Streaming coding and decoding algorithm or CODEC.
Virtual Human Maia, your guide to Bonn, is only possible on today's devices with split-rendering.
Mawari's solution allows developers to seamlessly integrate cloud rendered 3D content with on-device rendered content. Companies have been calling this split-rendering, the ability to select what elements to render on device and what elements to render on the cloud. Qualcomm started calling the split-rendering approach “Boundless XR” in early 2020.
KDDI (Japan’s second largest telco) created a multilingual, Digital-Human Guide named Aiko to demonstrate their Digital Human as a Service (DHaaS). Mawari’s 3D XR Content Streaming Platform was used as the delivery solution. Aiko is multilingual, has a semantic understanding, is location aware, and photorealistic. Through the smartphone’s screen Aiko seems to be standing next to you, providing seamless indoor and outdoor wayfinding services in Tokyo, delivered with AWS Wavelength over the KDDI 5G Network. Sturfee supplied outdoor navigation and Immersal indoor navigation. KDDI wanted to enable an easy navigation experience from the subway to a shopping mall and, upon entering, navigate to specific shops and find special offers. It was just too much for the humble smartphone, whose battery burns as it struggles to absorb the data coming from superfast 5G pipes.
“The volumetric streaming of photorealistic digital humans is a challenge even at 5G's low latency and increased speed,” said Luis Ramirez, co-founder and CEO of Mawari. “The project has a very complex backend that includes dynamic lighting, high-quality textures, detailed geometry, animations, and natural language processing. This requires a lot more computing power than a 5G smartphone has. This is a structural problem that goes far beyond virtual helpers like Aiko. If we are ever to have fully embodied photorealistic communication at scale, 5G alone is not enough.” Mawari’s solution is to use multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) to stream XR.
Mawari’s platform also allows for interactivity and two way communication. When you talk to Aiko she responds in real time. “DHaaS is the first demonstration of the capabilities in Mawari’s 3DXR Content Streaming Platform” said Ramirez “It enables accurate delivery of interactive, personalized, geo-local 3DXR experiences on smartphones and XR glasses. We see this as the first of many potential uses for this platform’s capabilities.”
Luis Ramirez, co-founder and CEO of Mawari.
Ramirez, 39, studied Mathematics and Music in college. In 2015, he co-founded Mutek JP, the Japanese version of MUTEK, a digital arts festival that always pushes the boundaries of technology. In 2016 Ramirez and Takeo Yatabe co-founded Mawari to democratize the creation of distribution of immersive content. Their first product was a 3D/AR/VR ad creation and distribution platform, called Mawari Studio. “This is where we first realized the bottlenecks of rendering and content delivery for 3D at scale,” Ramirez said. Aleksandr Borisov, CTO, who is based in Russia, joined the team and became Mawari’s technical co-founder.
Effectively, Mawari’s solution is not unlike other enabling technologies that have appeared in recent history, which is what it’s been called the “MP3 of AR.” Mike Boland, Senior XR Market Analyst at ARtillery Intelligence, sees Mawari’s 3D Straming CODEC and split rendering solution as a possible 30 billion dollar opportunity by 2024. “Mawari is the backbone technology enabling rich AR content delivery for the spatial web,” says Boland.
“It has become clear to hardware makers, telcos and infrastructure providers that they need to do split rendering.” Said Ramirez. Mawari is currently in discussions with hardware manufacturers, chip makers, telcos and infrastructure companies like AWS. Interestingly, The company closed a small $350K angel round in 2018 and has generated enough cash flow to underwrite the company’s R&D efforts to date.
At the recent Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara last month, Mawari was nominated for Best Developer Tool / Solution. The co-founder and executive producer of AWE, venture capital investor Ori Inbar, is one of the company’s advisors. Mawari is moving their corporate HQ to the US in January and are currently raising their seed round to expand their R&D capabilities.
