Michael Guerin reveals his AR visions for the future
Last December, Imvizar hosted an augmented reality (AR) experience in Merrion Square as part of Dublin City Council’s Winter Lights festival.
For co-founder and CEO Michael Guerin, it represented a watershed moment between his past and his company’s possible future.
Before establishing Imvizar, Guerin worked as programme manager for the council’s Smart Docklands initiative, an award-winning testbed for smart city technologies.
For Dublin Winter Lights, Imvizar used Snap Spectacles, the AR wearable from social media giant Snap.
Snap is the “biggest AR company in the world” and responsible for eight billion uses of AR every day, according to the Belfast native, making the Snapchat parent a powerful partner for a rising startup.
The Winter Lights AR Experience was built with Spectacles, which as the name suggests are shaped like normal glasses rather than a chunky headset.
Users entered a cordoned-off area in Merrion Square, put on the glasses and interacted with the AR assets that appeared in front of them.
They could put together a wishing star or decorate a Christmas tree with the different decorations around them. It was “about the magic of Christmas and demonstrating the power of the Snap Spectacles”, Guerin says.
“Most people have never done anything like this at all, so trying to build something that’s really simple to use was a bit of a challenge. But the feedback was overwhelmingly positive with thousands of people using it.”
This was the first experience that Snap had been involved with in Ireland and a big success for Tara Street-based Imvizar too, with excellent reviews from users despite set-up taking place less than 24 hours before it went live.
Guerin and chief operating officer Adele Keane founded Imvizar in 2021 as a platform for publishing and distributing AR experiences created internally and by other users. The company was quickly labelled a possible ‘Netflix for AR’.
In the beginning, AR experiences developed by Imvizar were predominantly smartphone-based. Now the firm is creating experiences for headsets such as Spectacles, Meta Quest and Samsung Galaxy, which Guerin puts down to market demand.
Imvizar does detailed analysis and complete scans of locations to build experiences on top of them and to ensure the virtual content is accurately positioned against the real-world backdrop.
“Where AR becomes interesting and exciting is if it augments on top of reality, which means it needs to understand, or you need to perceive that it understands, that the real world is there. That’s where the magic happens,” says Guerin, who believes that AR can be quite gimmicky without such attention to detail.
In late 2024 Imvizar raised €1.5m from investors including former Meta Ireland chief Gareth Lambe to fund the development of its AR creation tool, Lureo.
Guerin compares this to Canva, the free graphic design software that has four times as many users as the Adobe suite.
Over the past five years, the company has completed around 150 experiences in countries including Ireland, Portugal, Australia and Greece.
With the launch of Lureo, Imvizar has created a tool to “enable non-technical people to create experiences in a matter of minutes” and companies in the US, Turkey, Poland and Brazil have done so. The software has been in open beta since February.
“Our goal is to make spatial experience design really accessible as well, both in terms of the technical feasibility, so it has to be really easy to use, and then also in terms of cost, so the tool itself is now free for everyone to use,” Guerin says.
The elephant in the room here is generative artificial intelligence, which has not only captured investment and media attention but could also be seen to divert potential users away from alternative creative technologies such as AR.
However, Guerin does not view AI as a threat. Indeed, Imvizar integrates AI and Lureo “wouldn’t be possible” without it, although he is critical of the “AI slop” that is increasingly filling people’s social media feeds.
“The balance that we must strike is: are we AI-led or are we creator-led? I think what we see with AI slop is that if you become an AI-led company where people can easily prompt things and just churn stuff out, then that stuff becomes the basis of your product.”
Last year, Imvizar built an AI spatial storyteller tool for Lureo using AI that would allow users to build experiences with a couple of prompts before pulling back, not wanting “everything to become prompt-based”.
“You could tell it a story [about] something that happened in Dublin. As an example, we built one with two butchers outside a shop in Lisbon. And we gave it a bit of information. It asked you some questions, and then it created the whole scene for you — so characters, animations, voiceover, the whole script, the visuals, everything, which was cool to show off.
"But if we go that direction where everything is prompt-based, then we end up in a world where everything becomes quickly generated medium- or low-quality published content.
“If you look at all the creative tools that implemented AI successfully, the creator is the driver of the creation, and the AI is [meant] to take away the bits that are difficult or the hassle.”
At present, Lureo uses AI to generate assets from existing libraries for usersto drop into their scenes as well asaudio and script ideas. But the composition of the scene itself is left to the creator. Imvizar is working to incorporate Google Earth and make it easier to overlay AR experiences in real-life locations.
Although Imvizar has done “lots of work” for clients such as Google, Salesforce, Bupa and Calor Gas, Guerin concedes that the biggest barrier faced by the company is “demonstrating to people why and how they could use this” and convincing them to use AR rather than AI.
In a discussion with students at Georgetown University in Washington DC recently, few answered affirmatively when Guerin asked if they had used AR before. But that changed when he asked if they had used Pokemon Go, Instagram filters or the IKEA app.
“People are more comfortable with it than they think they are, because they actually use it more regularly than they expect,” Guerin says.
“There is a shift happening. We’ve moved from desktop computing to mobile computing, and there is a transition to spatial computing,” he adds, citing the launch of Snap Spectacles Meta Ray-Bans.
“I think people’s expectation will become spatial quite quickly, and there will be an expectation for spatial media. Where Lureo comes into that is if you’re a business and you want to keep up with the trends or be ahead of the trend. This enables you to do it quite quickly.”
Over 100,000 people have used Imvizar experiences to date, and a few thousand have used the beta version of Lureo. Guerin expects those numbers to grow considerably in the coming months.
One of the company's augmented reality projects.
The latest accounts show that Imvizar made accumulated losses of €1.01m to the end of 2024, although annual losses reduced from €476,377 to €349,041. Guerin claims revenues have doubled year-on-year for the past two to three years, and that the company is delivering real valuefor its clients.
Looking ahead, Imvizar is planning to raise €5m to scale Lureo, and the company has been having discussions with potential investors in both the US and Europe. Could Snap potentially come aboard?
“That would be nice. I never discussed that with them, so it would be hard to say whether they would or wouldn’t, but we’ll be working with Snap regardless,” Guerin says. “They have been a very solid partner. What we’re doing supports their vision.”
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