JigSpace might not be on your radar – or it might have fallen off or your radar. Or you might be a huge fan. Either way, the company has been making some movements recently that could result in a much bigger blip on the screen.
Here, we’ll take a look at JigSpace with a focus on their big news this year featuring an interview with Co-Founder and CEO Zac Duff.
JigSpace is an authoring platform as well as a viewer for augmented reality educational models called “jigs.” “Jig” is also a shorthand for the complete company name.
“We’ve been around for quite a while now, in AR terms; since 2015,” Duff told ARPost in a May interview. “I started prototyping what I thought was going to be PowerPoint for 3D.”
Typically, jigs are 3D models that explode physical objects to explain how they work or fit together. Use cases include education and remote assistance.
“Our goal for Jig is for a user to look at something and think ‘how does that work?’ and the answer is immediately available,” said Duff. “We experience the world in 3D but all of our information is in 2D.”
JigSpace is available as a free app for iPhone and iPad, but the premium subscription comes with a desktop interface, as well as other perks. Using either the mobile or the desktop app, users can create their own jigs by uploading their own models or using models uploaded by other jig users. From there, they can add other AR annotations to share their knowledge.
“For the most part, the tools that people have to share information in 3D are fairly restrictive,” said Duff. “We focus our platform on being the earliest and simplest way to share 3D communications.”
There’s a reason that ARPost met Duff in May – it was in conjunction with the Snap Partner Summit. During the summit, a partnership was announced between JigSpace and Snap that will make jigs even more accessible to users.
The first iteration of the partnership teaches users how to operate and even repair some common kitchen appliances, but Duff is hopeful that even more jigs will come to snap in the future.
Skip ahead to June. JigSpace announces passing a $4.7M Series A funding round, including investments from Rampersand, Investible, Vulpes, and Roger Allen AM. Adam Draper, founder and managing director of Boost VC who contributed to pre-seed funding, reportedly went so far as to call the company “one of the most important companies on the planet.”
According to a release shared with ARPost, the funding will be used to accelerate the “global expansion and development” of the company and its services.
“This round of funding will help us to continue to deliver on our vision of jigs everywhere and accessible to everyone,” said Duff.
If you haven’t seen jigs before, you might soon. And if you haven’t seen enough, get ready to see a lot more of them. We’re looking forward to having an educational layer over our reality, and JigSpace is making it happen.
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