extended-reality
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Disguise makes the show before the show
Before U2 filled Sphere with moving images, Disguise helped put the spectacle on a computer. Now the company is taking its stagecraft from server racks to laptops - without losing the plot, or the pixels.
The Garage That Sold Google Cardboard, Then Sold America Its Whole VR Stack
A bootstrapped LA outfit began by folding cardboard goggles in a garage. A decade and 10,000-plus headsets later, it sells the whole spatial-computing stack to hospitals, factories and defense labs.
The Quiet Machinery Behind Fashion, Training and Customer Service
CGS spent four decades becoming indispensable in the least visible parts of enterprise life. Now its sprawling mix of fashion software, immersive learning and global outsourcing has been split into sharper businesses for an AI-shaped market.
The Agency That Moves Into the Machine Room
Aquent Studios does not merely deliver the campaign. It builds the team, workflow and technical plumbing that help an enterprise keep delivering after the first brief is finished.
BILT Incorporated
BILT Incorporated is a Grapevine, Texas software company that replaces paper manuals and static PDFs with 3D, voice- and text-guided Intelligent Instructions for assembling, installing, maintaining, and repairing physical products. Through its mobile app and, increasingly, extended-reality headsets, BILT lets people rotate and zoom animated 3D models step by step, cutting setup time, support calls, and product returns. Brands from Weber and NordicTrack to Siemens, Chamberlain, and Clearfield use BILT to turn the first-use experience into a source of customer loyalty, while government and military customers use it for training and readiness.
DigiLens Inc.
DigiLens is a Silicon Valley optics company that designs, manufactures, and licenses holographic waveguide displays - the transparent, printed lenses that let augmented reality smartglasses overlay digital information onto the real world. Founded in 2003 as SBG Labs around a switchable Bragg grating technology, the company pairs its proprietary CrystalClear photopolymer with an inkjet-printing and holographic contact-copy process it argues can scale AR optics to consumer price points. Alongside licensing its optics to manufacturers, DigiLens builds ARGO, a standalone AR/XR smartglasses platform aimed at enterprise and industrial workers, and counts Samsung, Sony, Continental, and Niantic among its investors.
Quintar, Inc.
Quintar is a Santa Clara-based extended reality company building a device-agnostic spatial XR platform that turns physical venues into digitally enhanced 'Quintar Places.' Its patented Q.reality platform combines a Spatial Visual Positioning System with True Spatial Video to overlay real-time, data-driven content on live sports and other events. Quintar is the official mobile AR and XR developer of the PGA TOUR and built PGA TOUR Vision, the first professional golf application for Apple Vision Pro. Founded in 2021 by former Intel CTO Dr. Sankar (Jay) Jayaram and Dr. Jeff Jonas, the company has raised roughly $11 million, including an $8.2 million Series A in 2024.
Swave Photonics
Swave Photonics is a Belgium-based fabless semiconductor company building the world's first true holographic display chip. Spun out of imec and Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2022, Swave's Holographic eXtended Reality (HXR) platform uses a CMOS spatial light modulator with sub-300nm 'Diffraction Pixels' to sculpt light into natural 3D images - aiming to replace the waveguides and varifocal lenses in AR glasses, heads-up displays and glasses-free 3D walls with a single scalable chip.
STRIVR
STRIVR is a Santa Clara workforce-performance company that began by putting Stanford quarterbacks in virtual reality and now puts AI on the factory floor. After pioneering enterprise VR training for Fortune 1000 giants like Walmart, Verizon and Bank of America, STRIVR has shifted from preparing people for work to guiding them inside the flow of work - building hands-free, smart-glasses AI that detects and corrects operational mistakes in real time and turns expert know-how into instant visual instructions.