Telepresence is Here on Your Smartphone and it’s Free.

William Gibson famously said “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
All of us have seen the marvels of AR in compelling commercials and presentations. You can definitely already have amazing AR experiences with powerful, pricey, and nice hardware such as Magic Leap’s. But when will the industry have the Ford Model T moment? When will we have a useful AR application that can be used by anyone?

OVR just took a big step forward on this path for the democratization of cutting edge AR tech by enabling Telepresence from your smartphone. Just 3 steps are needed to enter the metaverse and enable telepresence chatting: download the OVR app, take a selfie to create your photorealistic avatar, initiate AR Chat and teleport your avatar wherever your friends are!
Both you and your guest will be able to see each other’s avatars right in front of you, merged with the physical world. That’s not all, if your friend walks in his physical space you will see his avatar walking in your space, you’ll be able to see his lips moving while he’s speaking and if your friend’s device has a frontal depth camera (iPhone X & onwards) you’ll also see his facial expressions transposed live on his avatar.

This first version allows for 1-on-1 telepresence only, but in the near future, we’ll enable AR group chats and many other features to expand even further on this new way of interacting long distance with each other. With OVR you can not only build your geo-localized AR/VR experience, but you can be in said Metaverse with your avatar, interacting with other avatars.
We can’t wait to see what the OVR community will build out of this exciting new feature!