Mr Deans, who has been an entrepreneur since dropping out of school at 17 after struggling with dyslexia, first started toying with augmented reality technology 14 years ago while running New Zealand digital consultancy One Fat Sheep.
At the time the technology had not yet been proven and was “pretty gimmicky”, according to Deans, but his first project utilising AR in 2013 proved to be a huge success.
Working with one of New Zealand’s largest pizza franchises called Hell Pizza, his agency created a 3D AR game where players pointed their mobile devices at the Hell pizza box and they were able to shoot zombies. It became one of the most downloaded games in New Zealand for a short time, even beating the Facebook and Trade Me app downloads for its first two weeks.
On the back of this Mr Deans was approached by brands like Red Bull wanting to experiment with AR, but they were finding it hard to manage and time-consuming, leading him to come up with the idea for Plattar.
An example of Plattar’s augmented reality tech shows how appliances could look on a kitchen bench.
Despite only launching its Plattar XR platform in November, the company already has 100 enterprise clients, including Snooze, Fisher & Paykel, Bakers Delight and REA Group.
It also counts shopping centre group Vicinity Centres, Nespresso and CUB as clients, charging anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month for a small business customer to a few thousand for large enterprise clients.
Vicinity has used the platform to create its DFO Insider product for its DFO shopping centres, which is currently in beta testing and is scheduled to be released in early 2019.
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“The initial campaign to support the rollout of the DFO Insider app will involve a ‘treasure hunt’ feature where users can collect coins found at six locations around each of the DFO Shopping Centres. Users can interact with the AR content, including snapping pics of themselves or their friends, while having the chance to collect coins and win from a prize pool of more than $40,000 across all centres,” Vicinity regional general manager of DFO, Justin Blumfield, said.
Late last year Ikea launched an app which lets customers see what furniture looks like in their homes before buying it. Mr Deans said the furniture giant was an early adopter of AR technology, but Plattar will extend this type of technology to all retailers and also gives them the ability to implement AR features direct through their websites, rather than via an app.
The start-up has raised $1.2 million in capital from News Corp, along with some private angel investors prior to launch and Mr Deans said it was gearing up for a fresh capital raise of $2-3 million, most likely from Asian investors.
“We want to expand into new markets overseas … initially in Asia as a starting point. We have some relationships there already and with the next round of investment we’ve already had a lot of inbound inquiries from that region,” he said.