Total Immersion

Total Immersion
Information
Industry	Augmented reality software
Founded	1998 (company materials cite 1999)
Founder	Bruno Uzzan, Valentin Lefèvre
Headquarters	Suresnes, France
Notable Personnel	Bruno Uzzan (co-founder, CEO), Valentin Lefèvre (co-founder), Didier Lesteven (chairman and CEO from 2013)
Products	D'Fusion, TryLive
Website	http://www.t-immersion.com

Total Immersion was a French augmented reality software company, co-founded by Bruno Uzzan and Valentin Lefèvre, that developed the D'Fusion AR platform and the TryLive virtual try-on products. The company described D'Fusion as patented technology that integrated "real time interactive 3D graphics into a live video stream". It was registered with the Nanterre commercial court and had its head office in Suresnes from 2002 until 2015.

Total Immersion sold AR for marketing campaigns and events, museum and theme park installations, toys and trading cards, and later offered D'Fusion Studio to developers free of charge for non-commercial use. The company entered a French safeguard procedure in July 2015. The TryLive business was sold to the optical measurement company ACEP in November 2015, and the original company was liquidated; the liquidation closed for insufficient assets in September 2021.

Reviewed 4 October 2026. Checked founding, address, director and insolvency dates against BODACC open-data records and Pappers, and company history, funding, product and project claims against the archived Total Immersion and TryLive pages, TechCrunch, GamesBeat, VentureBeat and Game Developer. About review dates.

History

Founding

A company history published on Total Immersion's website in 2011 says that Valentin Lefèvre had worked for a French maker of flight simulators before co-founding Total Immersion with Bruno Uzzan in 1998. Their first product, according to that account, was Visio Training, a fitness simulation that combined a treadmill with video so that runners could move through the streets of different cities. The French company register gives 1 March 1998 as the start of the company's activity, and its first address, on avenue de Suffren in Paris, was registered in care of Uzzan. The head office moved to Aubervilliers in December 2000 and to Suresnes in June 2002. Total Immersion's later marketing and press boilerplate, and press coverage such as TechCrunch's, gave 1999 as the founding year instead.

The same 2011 history says the company then developed D'Fusion, its software for mixing live video with animation. It dates the company's first AR image, a tiger, to 2004, when the company was moving from a garage to a warehouse, and says Total Immersion won a "Demogod" award at the DEMO technology conference that year. GamesBeat later reported that the company had presented at DEMO in 2004 and 2007.

Growth and funding

By 2009 the company described itself as working in experiential marketing and events, live stage presentations, sales support, permanent installations at museums and theme parks, and home PC and mobile use. Its venture backers sat on the board. A December 2008 registry notice lists Uzzan as chairman and chief executive, Lefèvre as deputy chief executive, and I Source Gestion, Elaia Partners and Partech Europe Partners IV among the directors.

On 24 March 2011, Total Immersion announced a US$5.5 million round led by Intel Capital, with existing investors Partech, iSource and Elaia Partners also taking part. TechCrunch reported that the company had raised more than US$11 million in total. The money was earmarked for D'Fusion development, expansion in Asia and the United States, the developer community and new consumer markets, and Intel said it would work with Total Immersion on new usage experiences for its own platforms. Intel Capital had also led a US$14 million round for the Dutch AR company Layar, announced in November 2010. In February 2012, GamesBeat reported that Total Immersion had 90 employees, more than 6,000 developers using D'Fusion and over 100 partners. The company told GamesBeat it had raised US$12 million across three rounds and had become profitable in 2010. In 2011 its website listed offices in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, Frankfurt, Madrid, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Shift to TryLive

Total Immersion launched TryLive on 14 June 2011 as an AR platform for e-commerce. The first product was TryLive Eyewear, which used markerless face recognition and tracking so that shoppers could see eyeglass frames on their own faces in live video from a computer or smartphone. At the same time the company expanded its partnership with Adobe so that TryLive could use assets managed in Adobe Scene7. By the end of 2014 the company said it was focusing all of its AR development on TryLive, a suite of virtual try-on tools for retail, e-commerce and mobile commerce. It also said its AR engine, "previously named D'Fusion", had been used in more than 2,000 AR projects.

Registry notices show a change of leadership in this period. A notice published in October 2013 lists Didier Lesteven as chairman and chief executive from 14 October 2013, with Uzzan remaining an ordinary director; Uzzan no longer appears among the directors in a notice published in January 2014, and Lesteven was still chairman and chief executive in February 2015.

Insolvency and sale

On 30 July 2015, the Nanterre commercial court opened a safeguard procedure (procédure de sauvegarde) for Total Immersion. The company moved its registered office to 33 rue du Mail in Paris with effect from 7 August 2015. The court converted the safeguard into a judicial reorganisation (redressement judiciaire) on 7 October 2015 and approved a sale plan (plan de cession) on 13 November 2015.

On 25 November 2015, Total Immersion announced that TryLive had been acquired by ACEP, a specialist in optical measurement. ACEP formed a new subsidiary, ACEP-Trylive, headed by ACEP Group chief executive Jean-Philippe Sayag. The deal covered the TryLive technology, intellectual property, partner and subcontractor contracts, and all TryLive client contracts signed by Total Immersion, and the employees working on TryLive moved to ACEP. ACEP TryLive was registered in Paris on 1 December 2015 with ACEP Group as its president, and its registered activity later included software "spécialisés dans la réalité augmentée". By March 2016 the TryLive website described TryLive as "a brand of Acep TryLive".

Total Immersion itself was placed in judicial liquidation on 25 November 2015. The court closed the liquidation for insufficient assets on 29 September 2021, and the company was struck off the register on 4 October 2021.

Products

Product	Introduced	Description
D'Fusion	By 2004	The company's AR engine and authoring platform, sold in several editions. Total Immersion's 2011 website listed the D'Fusion Suite with D'Fusion Studio, D'Fusion Pro, D'Fusion Mobile and D'Fusion @Home, plus D'Fusion for Adobe Flash and a D'Fusion SDK for Adobe Flash.
D'Fusion Studio 3.2	2011	Free version of the authoring tool for non-commercial use. It targeted iOS, Android, web browsers, Microsoft Kinect and kiosks, and supported markerless tracking including face tracking.
SkinVaders	2011	Free iOS game built by Total Immersion to demonstrate D'Fusion Studio. It used the player's face as the game terrain for attacking aliens.
TryLive	2011	Virtual try-on platform for retail and e-commerce. It started with TryLive Eyewear and later covered jewelry, watches and in-store retail.

XR work

D'Fusion was a video see-through AR system: it tracked a target in a camera feed and drew 3D graphics into that live video in real time. According to the company's description of D'Fusion Studio 3.2, the tool used markerless tracking, including face tracking, and could recognize an image from a target store of up to 1,000 images. Total Immersion claimed this was far more than the 30 targets supported by competing products. It also let developers use one authoring environment and one set of assets for several platforms. In November 2011 the company said it was optimizing the D'Fusion computer vision platform for Texas Instruments' OMAP mobile processors. In 2012 it showed an AR Formula 1 racing demo at the Game Developers Conference. The demo used D'Fusion integrated with the Unity engine and ran on Intel Ultrabooks, with gesture detection and face tracking that placed a helmet on the player's face.

Several of the company's consumer projects used webcams on home computers:

• In March 2009, Topps released Topps 3D Live baseball cards built with Total Immersion's technology. The set had 33 cards of Major League Baseball players; a fan held a card under a webcam, and rotating the card and pressing keys controlled the player in an on-screen game. VentureBeat called it the first consumer product based on Total Immersion's technology, which had debuted at DEMO 2007 and had been used in theme parks for the launch of The Dark Knight.
• In 2009, Mattel's toy line for the film Avatar came with webcam-scannable cards that brought up AR characters on screen. TechCrunch reported that Total Immersion made the technology; touching a spot on a card made the on-screen character pull a knife, fire a gun or recount part of the story.

See also

• Augmented reality
• Metaio
• Vuforia
• Markerless tracking
• Face tracking