From gaming to entrepreneurship
Alexander got his start as a game developer. He founded the independent game studio Ideonic in 2006 in his native U.K. While teaching him valuable business skills, it also served as a vessel to tinker, hack and explore digital technologies and their potential to disrupt. That's where he developed his love of AR. But when pitching AR ideas, he quickly realized that nobody is investing without seeing a prototype.
"As a developer, I could have spent a few days coding up a prototype," he recalled. "But I thought that was too slow. Maybe I'm just lazy but I felt like there had to be a quicker way to prototype. I had a look around, couldn't find any way to do it — so I pivoted and decided to build it myself."
What started as a side project in his spare bedroom has blossomed into an early-stage company with two part-time employees.
"The product I'm building needs to exist whether I invent it or not," he said. "Somebody is going to do it, might as well be me."
An AR future
The potential market for wiARframe is huge, as AR will fundamentally change how we interact with the world and get information. For example, people use navigation apps everyday — what if you could see the directions without looking down at your phone? Perhaps an arrow appears on the actual road?
"My belief is that over the next few years, we're going to see a boom of mobile AR applications. They're going to become integral to our day-to-day lives — much like the previous generation of apps has already done. Eventually the hardware is going to catch up and we'll end up swapping out our smartphone for smart glasses."
Alexander's passion could make him the perfect person to bring AR-prototyping to the masses.
"I've been an entrepreneur for most of my life. The drive to build great stuff always helped me overcome the fear of failure often associated with entrepreneurship," he said. "I love thinking about things that should exist in world — stuff from Sci-Fi books — and trying to create those and give them to the world. Sci-Fi has done a great job of predicting the future. Now the weight falls on the shoulders of entrepreneurs, innovators and scientists to actually create that great stuff."
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