Campfire

Campfire
Information
Type	Private
Industry	Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality
Founded	2018 (as Meta View); renamed Campfire 2021
Founder	Jay Wright
Headquarters	San Mateo, California, United States
Notable Personnel	Jay Wright (CEO)
Products	Campfire holographic collaboration system, Campfire Headset, Campfire Console, Campfire Pack
Website	https://www.campfire3d.com

Campfire is an American Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality company that develops a holographic collaboration system for professional 3D design and engineering teams. The company is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and is led by chief executive Jay Wright, who previously co-founded and ran Qualcomm's Vuforia augmented reality platform. Rather than position its product as a general-purpose headset, Campfire describes it as a "holographic collaboration system" built to fit into existing professional workflows, letting distributed teams view and discuss the same 3D model as a shared hologram.

The company grew out of the assets and intellectual property of Meta, an earlier augmented reality startup that became insolvent in 2019, and reused much of that hardware foundation in its own headset. Campfire's hardware centers on the Campfire Headset, whose lenses can be swapped magnetically between a translucent set for Augmented Reality and an opaque visor for Virtual Reality, and which offers a 92-degree diagonal Field of View, described by the company as more than four times the viewing area of leading enterprise AR headsets of the time.

History

Origins in Meta and Meta View

Campfire traces its lineage to Meta, the augmented reality company founded in 2012 by Meron Gribetz, which raised roughly 75 million US dollars and shipped the Meta 2 development headset before running out of money. In January 2019 Meta declared itself insolvent after its primary lender foreclosed and sold the company's assets. A venture capital firm acquired pieces of the defunct startup and formed a new company, called Meta View, to commercialize Meta's AR visor design and patent portfolio. In May 2019 Meta View announced that it had acquired Meta's intellectual property and named Jay Wright, the former president and general manager of Qualcomm Vuforia, as its chief executive.

Over the following roughly two years the team reworked the inherited technology into an enterprise collaboration product. The company rebranded as Campfire and emerged from stealth on April 27, 2021, unveiling a holographic collaboration system aimed at professional 3D design and engineering workflows. The industrial design firm frog served as an early development partner and user, and Campfire said its system was built on more than 60 patents.

Funding

Alongside its stealth exit, Campfire disclosed that it had raised more than 8 million US dollars in seed funding. The round was backed by OTV (formerly Olive Tree Ventures), Kli Capital, Tuesday Capital, and other investors.

Product launches

At AWE USA 2022 on June 1, 2022, Campfire introduced the Campfire Studio Console, an expansion of the system for design studios and large indoor spaces. Built from modular floor mats that can be assembled in minutes, the Studio Console lets multiple people walk around and through life-size Mixed Reality holograms of vehicles, structures, and environments. Wright said hundreds of companies from aerospace, automotive, apparel, and retail had applied for early access.

On May 16, 2023, Campfire announced general availability of its holographic collaboration application, which it called a "killer app" for enterprise XR. The release added a multi-platform app for Windows PC, Mac, and iPad that works alongside the Campfire Headset, supports more than 40 types of 3D model formats, and uses holographic avatars so each participant can see what the others are looking at. Pricing followed a freemium model, with enterprise plans starting at 1,500 US dollars per user per year and a Campsite starter kit, bundling two headsets, packs, consoles, a Studio Console, and five enterprise licenses, priced at 15,000 US dollars per year. The headset was certified to run plug-and-play over Thunderbolt 3 with Dell Precision workstations, and aerospace supplier Collins Aerospace was named among early-access customers. By the time of the 2023 launch the company described its system as resting on more than 70 patents.

Technology

Campfire's central design idea is to make holograms appear in a stable, shared location so that several people can gather around them as they would around a physical prototype. The system has three hardware parts that work together with the app.

The Campfire Headset is a tethered display that connects to a PC by a direct wired link, which the company says provides the power and reliability that enterprise users need. It uses an inside-out tracking approach with no RGB cameras, and its lenses attach magnetically so a user can switch between a translucent set for Augmented Reality and an opaque visor for Virtual Reality. Hands-on reporting put the headset at a 2560 by 1440 resolution running at 60 Hz, with a 92-degree diagonal Field of View.

The Campfire Console is a small tabletop device that acts like a holographic projector, giving the system a fixed origin point so that a hologram reliably appears above the table for everyone present, including remote participants who are represented in the same shared space. The Campfire Pack is an accessory that clips onto an ordinary smartphone and turns it into a 3D controller, an approach meant to remove the learning curve of bespoke handheld controllers. On the software side, the Scenes tool imports 3D models from CAD and other formats, while the Viewer displays those scenes on a headset, tablet, or phone.

Market position

Campfire competes in the enterprise Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality market for design review and collaboration, where it is positioned against standalone headsets such as the HoloLens 2 and the Magic Leap 2, as well as mixed reality use of the Meta Quest 3. Its differentiators are the wide 92-degree field of view, the table-anchored Console for reliable hologram placement, the phone-based controller, and a subscription business model targeting product design, engineering, architecture, and automotive teams. The company's product is documented in more detail on the Campfire 3D page.