Horacio Torrendell; Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
Treeview, a leading boutique development shop in South America, has established a global presence in extended-reality software.
The company works with enterprise companies in the US, Europe, and the South Pacific to develop augmented- and virtual-reality applications for major platforms, including Meta's Quest, Apple's Vision Pro, and Microsoft's HoloLens. Its clients include Microsoft, education institutions such as the University of Alberta, and healthcare companies like Medtronic.
Business Insider spoke with Treeview's founder, Horacio Torrendell, to learn more about how business and enterprise clients are leveraging AR and VR hardware for XR applications.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
How'd you get into this line of work?
Treeview started around 2015 when I got an Oculus DK2 for university. I began doing freelance work with the hardware when there were very few VR developers in South America. I found some clients, started growing, and started to build a team. We did a lot of work with startups from 2017 to 2020. Now we're focusing on enterprise clients.
What's your take on the arc of the AR/VR industry's journey so far?
I see it more as steps than an arc. It's all generation-based, with new hardware opening up new use cases.
We started with PC VR for tinkering and exploration, then mobile VR like Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard. Next came stand-alone VR and mobile AR, where we did a lot of work with startups on projects similar to Ikea Place and construction tools. Now we're entering the mixed-reality generation with Vision Pro and Meta Quest.
Each step brings initial confusion as people figure out how to use the new technology, so I think of it as a staircase. Every time there's a new step up, there's a period of adjustment. We're at the start of the mixed-reality generation, and people are still figuring out what they can do with it. I expect we'll see much more mature use cases in the next year or two as the current technology paradigm settles.
What kind of problems are companies coming to you with now?
Our main focus for the last three years has been training and education. There's a huge demand in this area, but it's challenging to scale because building a high-quality training simulator requires a lot of effort.
We're excited about the emerging trend of merging AI with XR. Currently, AI is primarily a back-end, server-side concept that people interact with through text prompting. What's really interesting now is exploring how we can interact with AI through different computing interfaces, particularly immersive ones.
Can you help me visualize how AI is being integrated into a training experience?
One project we're working on with Microsoft is part of what they call the industrial metaverse. It's mainly around digital twins, which are digital replicas of physical locations with data overlaid onto that information. We're working on one of the largest renewable-energy-production sites in Uruguay.
We have a bunch of data and a real-life location, and we want to interact with that data. The way we're thinking of this is, how do you query that information? We have data that doesn't make sense without the context of the location, which is this actual wind farm.
Previously, you might filter that information by time stamps or ask specific questions with a predefined user interface. But we're exploring how to have a conversation with that data through an AI model that's trained on top of that data and large language models.
It's opening the possibility of having a conversation with a computer about a piece of content that is a physical representation of a physical place with data on top of that place.
Treeview
What sort of hardware platforms do you target on a project like this?
This project targets Microsoft HoloLens 2, mobile with AR capabilities, and the standard web. We have to remember that XR is just one component in a larger set of software solutions. It's crucial to vertically integrate these technologies based on how you're interacting with the data.
Having stakeholders around a table with HoloLens, discussing data on-site in a real environment, would be the highest tier of experience. But there's still value in having a website with a 3D model that you can browse and interact with through chat prompts.
Let's zoom out a bit and talk about your workflow when starting a new project. How do you begin to scope out what a project is going to be?
We call that the discovery phase. It's about trying to understand what the client or the use case is about, not just receiving a list of requirements. It's a brainstorm that we have with clients.
For many of these corporations, there's value in deploying a solution. But there's also a lot of value in the innovation approach, in knowing exactly what's going on with this technology, exploring it, and doing some internal tinkering.
What's the scale of what you're normally building in terms of distribution?
With business-to-business projects, there is not a massive distribution. There are specific use cases and internal tools rather than customer-facing applications. However, we do have some clients, especially on the startup side, who have done more massive rollouts.
For context, we recently launched a free educational app for Apple Vision Pro. The project is called Inviewer, and it's like a Wikipedia of interactive spatial content. This app is featured in the education category of the app store, which is pretty cool. After four weeks, it had about 2,600 users.
Are companies looking to hit certain metrics, like reducing time or improving knowledge?
One of our largest clients is a startup that's a leader in employee training, though I can't name it due to nondisclosure agreements. What I can say is that some companies are training employees for specific tasks, like installing an electric circuit.
There's also huge demand in the market for institutions to provide context to, say, students about what they can do, especially for professional or technical careers. They want to get a feel for what it's like to install solar panels, for example.
These kinds of applications address a real need in the market. They help people understand career options they might not have known existed.
You mentioned you developed for the Apple Vision Pro. How are the latest headsets, like the Vision Pro, changing what you can achieve?
Apple brought the whole concept of eye gazing, the concept of prioritizing windows, and the fact that those windows can be expanded. That's a lot of new paradigms in the user-interface experience that Apple brought to the table, and it's been amazing.
