South Korea’s Circus Company, an augmented and virtual reality (AR, VR) platform, solutions and contents provider, has been leading the AR and VR industries in the nation. More than 200 companies and public organizations are using the services of the company which has created more than 5,000 contents. It aids firms to do AR marketing and create educational and tourism contents for public institutions such as Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science & Creativity and National Institute of Ecology.

More than 300,000 people have downloaded the company’s application Circus AR that allows users to see its AR and VR contents. It also launched a solution program Circus Creator that enables production, operation and management of AR services.

Fascinated by AR, its chief executive officer Park Sun-wook founded Circus Company in 2011 after leaving his stable job as a company consultant. The first content he made was an AR calendar of a Korean actor Jang Geun-suk who also has many fans abroad. By allowing users to view his video messages when they scan his photos, the calendar drew a huge popularity from his fans from home and abroad.

“Circus Company has competitiveness as we can provide an integrated service from contents planning to development, production, distribution and marketing,” said Park.

He also said that the future AR industry would be led by mixed reality (MR) service providers such as Magic Leap, an AR headset developer who attracted 1.6 trillion won worth global investment. Global tech giant Microsoft also developed a mixed reality glasses named HoloLens. Mixed reality refers to a convergence of a real and virtual world. “The dominance of AR would get bigger as the technology incorporates much-advanced image-recognition technology on top of big data and artificial intelligence,” Park said. “In the future, people will no longer type to search information, but scan to search.”

Park said the application of AR is unlimited. It is no exaggeration to say that in the near future, we could have medical information such as a blood type of an unconscious person just by scanning his face with a smartphone in case of an accident, he said.

By Hong Sung-yoon

[ⓒ Pulse by Maeil Business News Korea & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]