Tech Talk: Adding life to unbuilt concrete structures with mixed reality.

Byline: Mutaher Khan

Selling is a pretty tricky job and if one is trying to sell something that does not yet exist, well, it makes everything much more complex. Take a mega construction project, for example, offering a residential complex with multi-storey apartments and commercial area and what not. But how do you show that to a potential customer when it's still a mere architectural drawing? Bring in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), the task becomes pretty easy. And that's exactly what mimAR offers.

An Islamabad based B2B startup, mimAR brings life to the boring world of concrete structures. Using augmented and virtual reality, the startup lets construction companies offer interactive visualisation to its customers. How? With just a smartphone camera, it transforms the paper-based drawing into an AR image, giving you a better idea of how the facility will look like when ready. In case you fancy a more immersive experience, there is the VR option to have a 360 degree view.

There is also an on-site AR option where the customers can visualise the to-be constructed buildings in their actual scale. Imagine standing next to the road and then being able to see a building pop up, how the area would look around it and what's the exterior like. But when buying property, it's the interior that usually matters more, no? Don't worry, they got that front covered as well. Whether you want to imagine where the kitchen will be, or what spot suits best for the TV, mimAR lets you do it all.

For businesses, what's the process like? The startup just needs the property's drawing from the builder which is transformed into 3D and then into AR/VR and takes less than a month. To be clear, mimAR doesn't have an app of its own and their solutions are accessed through the partner's application.

Currently they have served five clients, including the 60,000-square foot Sky Park One, Gulberg Greens and the 150,000-square foot The Palm apartments in Islamabad, while a few major projects are in the pipeline.

The startup was founded by Muhammad Naqi Ejaz, an architect from National University of Sciences and Technology, who had been working on his portfolio since freshman year and set up a small services company upon graduation last year. That eventually transformed into mimAR, when he developed the tech and launched it this March and joined the National Incubation Centre, Islamabad right after.

While the AR/VR technology has been largely embraced by edtech startups...

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