This week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Ostendo Technologies and Veea announced the signing of a letter of intent to combine Ostendo’s foundational quantum technologies and wearable display assets with Veea’s leading smart edge connectivity business. The combination creates a first-of-its-kind, standalone company.

According to their announcement, “The combined companies will create a new paradigm for hyper converged wireless solutions and a revolutionary solution for enabling Web3 capabilities for ambient interaction between people, places and things.”

What is Web3, exactly?

According to an article authored by Jessica Day, and published by the IEEE Computer Society, Web3 (otherwise known as Web 3.0) is what Tim Berners-Lee called “The Semantic Web.” “This internet works far more intuitively and is far more decentralized and democratic,” Day writes. “There’s a key relationship between the Internet’s nature and democracy.”

“Web 1.0 was a very rudimentary affair. Revolutionary in various ways, but not exactly a marvel of interactivity. It pretty much consisted completely of read-only messages, and thus functioned like an unprecedentedly massive notice board. Then came web 2.0. What was the key difference? The big change was interactivity. Users could create their own accounts and their own content.”

While there are many definitions of Web3, Day sums it up this way: “And now we’re on the cusp of web 3.0. What’s in store? It’s all going to get very decentralized,” while also saying, “It’s going to be championing principles of decentralization, with more autonomy being granted to users by allowing them to interact directly with each other across various networks.”

A particularly exciting element to the combination is Ostego’s formidable glasses. The glasses will serve as a completely new, intuitive, sleekly designed and affordable wearable that brings together the physical and digital worlds, supports AR and VR, co-viewing, and much more. Their QPI technology fully integrates multiple existing functions (i.e., display, optical collimator, image processor, decompression code), which reduces size and cost and makes the transition from mobile computing (smartphone and tablet) to a wearable computing platform a simple reality.

Additionally, their Visual Access Operating System enables concurrent visual interface between the multiple computing platforms (e.g., smartphones, tablets, PCs, game boxes, media streaming boxes, etc.) and the user. Visual context switching is performed in response to either a computing platform visual access request or user's selection prompt.

Ostendo’s advanced split manufacturing capabilities and visual interface products with Veea’s next generation edge computing and connectivity, will “deliver completely new ways of interacting with visual data to the consumers and enterprises alike with highly rewarding user experiences.”

Addressing growing demand for edge and spatial computing, the companies also described “a highly differentiated unified solution that integrates Veea’s edge computing platform, that is both cloud and locally managed, together with a totally wireless and truly wearable visual interface initially in the form of Augmented Reality (AR) glasses that resemble our reading or sunglasses without any sensory discomfort for daily use.”

Both companies bring an impressive portfolio of patent applications filed (nearly 500) and over 100 trade secrets.

"During my many conversations with Allen about the next great technology revolution, we always come back to the same conclusion: these technology franchises are stronger and more valuable together,” said Dr. Hussein S. El-Ghoroury, Ostendo co-founder and CEO. “We are excited about the opportunities this merger will create for our worldwide customers, our partners and our employees. Together we will solve the problem of the last 50 meters and the last three centimeters—changing how and what we see in our daily interactions with information, the real world and the people around us.”

“Veea’s edge platform and its underlying ability to deliver scalable edge computing, comprehensive environment sensing and AI-driven multimedia content delivery over wired and wireless networks, together with Ostendo’s breakthrough AR glasses will significantly augment and enhance Human Machine Interface with a contextual digital overlay of the world, that can be comfortably and fashionably worn throughout the day,” said Allen Salmasi, Chairman and CEO of Veea.  “Eventually, by enabling Web3 protocols and decentralized applications, Veea Edge Platform’s distributed computing paradigm will enable the users of Ostendo’s AR glasses to readily access highly unique Web3 applications such as DTube, Storj, Livepeer, Sola, DiFi, GameFi, most conveniently and securely make payments and conduct banking services, and much more.”

The combined companies will accelerate plans to commercialize Ostendo’s best-in-class wearable display products powered by its proprietary Quantum Photonic Imager (QPI) microprocessor of light – the world’s first and only full-color sub-10 micron μLED display-on-chip – and the Veea Edge Platform, which addresses the challenges posed by cloud computing at the edge by extending the Cloud to the edge through an “all-in-one” smart computing hub that offers a hyper converged network solution with the full range of wired and wireless connectivity, including fixed line and/or 4G/5G broadband access, cloud-native computing and distributed network storage with a highly optimized networking and application mesh, enterprise-grade security, and a developer portal with advanced tools and APIs to continue bringing a wide range of apps, including machine learning and AI apps, and managed services to the market, according to the announcement.

Augmented reality (AR) is currently one of the most impactful technologies available for both enterprises and consumers alike, having grown drastically since its original use by the military in the 1990s. For consumers, AR is being leveraged for the newest wave of smartphone applications, as well as enhancing experiences within the video game sector.

For enterprises, AR is providing a vast array of advantages regardless of industry, improving experiences for employees within e-commerce, education, medicine, manufacturing, among others. In the medical sector, AR assists healthcare professionals with advanced tech devices, allowing them to study human anatomy better and expanding global collaboration opportunities between physicians.

While AR, VR and Mixed Reality are already making a profound impact on a number of sectors, innovation never ceases, with the advent of AI and now more powerful affordable wearables and a growing crop of applications being used by field service companies (including ServiceNow, and ServiceMax which was recently acquired by PTC) wearables, especially when leveraged in unison with the edge, are offering enterprises limitless potential to become more efficient and provide excellent customer experiences.