Mira hopes to take AR mainstream with $99 phone-powered headset
San Francisco start-up Mira has raised $1.5m of funding from Sequoia Capital to commercialise its low-cost AR headset. Called Prism, the headset works much like an AR version of the Samsung Gear or Google Daydream systems. The user puts their phone into a slot and the images are projected from the screen, not via lenses directly onto the eyes (as in VR) but onto a transparent perspex visor, making virtual objects appear to exist in the real world.

Cofounders Matt Stern and Ben Taft showed me the device recently in San Francisco. I played around with a silly outer-space demo that had me do things like turn in circles to spot and shoot evil doughnut holes floating in an imaginary galaxy, and land a tiny rocket ship on a target.

Mira is using paper targets to affix some of its virtual objects to surfaces, and by using the iPhone’s front-facing camera, you can identify these targets and pull up associated 3-D virtual objects. So if you had an app projecting a three-dimensional chess board onto a marker on a table, for instance, you could walk around it or have multiple people view it from different angles at the same time.

The Prism headset looked extremely goofy, and I had some trouble navigating with the remote control. But the visuals looked pretty good even as I turned my head or, in the case of one virtual object that clung to the table, walked around them. And since it allows multiplayer interactions in AR via Bluetooth, it was neat to be able to play a Pac Man–like game against Taft. (Meanwhile, Stern was able to watch what we were doing from the display on his iPhone.)

Yet the world of AR and VR is still in the very early stages, so Mira is likely to struggle to fit in. Smartphone-reliant headsets like Gear VR and Google’s Daydream View VR are more popular than devices that need to be plugged in to a computer. But a total of only 2.3 million headsets—the vast majority of them for virtual reality—shipped out in the first three months of the year, according to tech market researcher IDC.

A big problem for even the biggest manufacturers is that there isn’t a ton of content—especially top-quality content—for these smartphone-based headsets, says Brian Blau, an analyst with the market research firm Gartner.

“I think that they’re going to have a tough road,” he says.