Retinad

Retinad
Information
Industry	Virtual Reality, Advertising, Analytics
Founded	2014
Founder	Anthony Guay, Samuel F. Poirier
Headquarters	Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Notable Personnel	Alexander Haque (CEO)
Products	Retinad VR analytics platform, VR advertising platform
Parent	LumiereVR

Retinad (also styled RetinadVR or Retinad VR) was a Montreal-based virtual reality analytics and advertising company. Founded in 2014, it built analytics software that recorded how people behaved inside VR applications, most visibly heat maps of where users looked, and an ad system that placed immersive 360-degree ads inside VR apps. When Road to VR covered the company in May 2015, it described Retinad as one of the only groups working on advertising and analytics in VR. On May 20, 2015, Retinad announced that it had raised $500,000 in an early-stage funding round. The company planned a platform that would let advertisers bid on ad placements and target them by criteria such as genre or platform.

In 2015 the entire Retinad analytics and ad system could be added to an app through a Unity plugin. The company later shifted toward analytics for 360-degree video and VR content aimed at advertisers, agencies and creative studios. In January 2019 the VR content and location-based entertainment company LumiereVR announced that it had acquired Retinad and would fold its analytics product into LumiereVR's own location-based entertainment suite.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked all history, product and infobox claims against Road to VR 2015, UploadVR 2015 and 2016, BetaKit 2016, Google Patents US20170206707A1, Advanced Television 2017, archived Retinad sites (2015, 2019) and the archived VRFocus 2019 acquisition report. About review dates.

History

Founding and early funding

Retinad was founded in 2014. Samuel Poirier and Anthony Guay were identified as co-founders in Road to VR's 2015 coverage. A United States patent application for a "virtual reality analytics platform", assigned to Retinad Virtual Reality Inc, names Anthony Guay, Samuel Forcier-Poirier, Kévin Ouellet, Pierre Cliche Jr., Patrice Robitaille and Sun Boisvert Knudsen as inventors.

The company's first product was a free analytics service for VR developers. Its early 2015 website called it "the world's first analytics platform made exclusively for Virtual Reality developers" and supported Oculus Rift applications built in Unity on Windows and Mac OS X, with support for other engines and devices promised later. The $500,000 round announced on May 20, 2015 came from Canadian angel investors, according to the co-founders, who said the money would first go toward new hires. At that time Retinad was preparing a private beta of its combined ad and analytics platform.

In September 2015 Retinad was named to the fall 2015 class of the River program, the startup accelerator run by the venture firm Rothenberg Ventures, which that season opened to "frontier tech" companies beyond VR. UploadVR's summary of the class described Retinad as an advertising and analytics platform built for VR that put developers first by collecting data about user experiences inside their applications.

Thiel Fellowship and behavioral analytics

In June 2016 co-founder Samuel F. Poirier was named a Thiel Fellow; BetaKit reported that he was the first French Canadian to receive the fellowship, which gives recipients a $100,000 grant. BetaKit described Retinad's platform as analyzing head movements to gauge users' emotional responses and how they interacted with VR applications. UploadVR reported in June 2016 that the company had 10 employees and that, besides gaze heat maps, it used custom software to detect fine motions such as breathing and laughing from head tracking data, with eye tracking integration planned. Poirier told UploadVR that the company aimed to "track everything that goes on in a VR app and become the default info platform for virtual reality", and said data was shown to customers as group trends rather than as individual users' data.

The patent application, filed on January 15, 2016 and published on July 20, 2017, describes an analytics recorder plugin inside a VR application that captures head position, orientation and viewing direction, compresses the data and sends it to analytics servers, which turn it into dashboards, heat maps and performance metrics, including frame rate and latency measurements related to presence. Google Patents lists the application as abandoned.

Advertising research

Retinad was a partner in a 2017 YuMe study of VR advertising, conducted with Isobar and RLTY CHK. Advanced Television described RetinadVR as "an immersive media analytics platform" among the study partners. The study reported 70 percent aided recall across all VR ad formats tested and 90 percent for pre-roll video ads, and 74 percent of respondents found VR ads less intrusive than traditional digital advertising. Alexander Haque, identified as CEO of Retinad Analytics, was quoted in the announcement. According to VRFocus, Retinad's platform was used in early VR studies with Google's Jump VR program, Yahoo!, YuMe, Isobar and the University of Montreal.

Acquisition by LumiereVR

On January 29, 2019, LumiereVR, a company founded in 2015 by Travis Wu and Jenny Qinya Guo, announced the acquisition of Retinad. LumiereVR's three main VR offerings were VR Theater, a distribution network in museums, aquariums and large venues; MoodPod, designed to fit into office spaces so workers could relax for 10 minutes; and content and production. Wu said LumiereVR had been a Retinad client and used its analytics daily to monitor its Microtheaters in the United States and Canada. Retinad's analytics product was to be rolled into LumiereVR's location-based entertainment suite and publicly re-released during 2019. VRFocus reported that Retinad had raised more than 2 million US dollars since its founding, and quoted Alexander Haque as the company's CEO. No purchase price was reported.

Products

Analytics

In addition to common analytics metrics such as number of active users, session length, types of HMDs and operating systems, Retinad demonstrated a heat map of the user's gaze. The heat map showed the developer where users were looking in the VR app.

The 2015 version of the service tracked daily, weekly and monthly active users, session length and average session duration, and new installations. It also recorded equipment data: the head-mounted displays in use (the site gave Oculus Rift DK1 and Oculus Rift DK2 as examples), rendering frame rate in the headset, the app's RAM usage and the computer's operating system. Developers installed it by importing Retinad's Unity package into a project that already used the Oculus SDK, dragging the plugin into the scene and entering their app and API keys.

At a demonstration seen by Road to VR on a Samsung Gear VR, the heat map appeared over a 360-degree concert video as colored blotches, red at the center, that moved in real time to show where viewers tended to look. The company also said the plugin would record which headsets were used to view an experience and how long users played.

By early 2019 Retinad marketed "intelligent data for advertisers, agencies and creatives". Its website described a drag-and-drop SDK that required no code, worked with all headsets and 360 VR formats, and gathered data on both mobile devices and VR headsets. Listed features included gaze heat maps, comparison of content performance across platforms, device type, location and hardware metrics, engagement scores and a measure of boredom, and user segmentation. An API offered real-time data with integrations for tools such as Mixpanel, Google Analytics and Tableau, as well as data management platforms and ad networks.

Advertising

Retinad aimed to bring immersive advertising to VR. It demonstrated 360 Photo and 360 Video pre-roll ads. These ads had gaze-based action points that let the user interact with the ad in various ways, such as Skip, More Info and Like. The app could play the ads during periods of inactivity, such as while the game was loading.

Road to VR reported that the VR app could load in the background while the user watched the pre-roll ad, and that developers could also place these "ad sessions" at other points, such as between levels. Developers did not have to deal with advertisers, creative assets or campaign setup; Road to VR compared the model to Google AdSense, where a slot is added and ads are streamed in automatically. Advertisers were to use a web portal to bid on placements and target them. UploadVR noted in 2015 that the ads were meant to be unintrusive and that advertisers would get the same analytics as developers.