Metaio

» see metaio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i missed metaio at the time. it was a developer-facing ar sdk and i was not building ar apps in 2010 to 2015. the closest i got was reading the junaio app press release once and noting the munich research-lab roots, then moving on. by the time i ended up doing computer vision work, metaio had already been acquired by apple and quietly folded into what would become arkit. its name does not appear in many of the histories.

metaio was founded in 2003 in munich as a spinoff from the technical university of munich. peter meier was the long-running technical lead. the company's core ip was a tracking-and-recognition library that could lock virtual graphics onto a real-world surface from a phone or a tablet camera. lego and ikea were among the brand customers. museums licensed the sdk to overlay artifact information on top of exhibits. the consumer-facing product was junaio, a mobile ar browser for ios and android that, like layar, let third parties publish content channels viewable through the phone camera.

apple acquired metaio on may 28 2015. the company cancelled its scheduled developer conference within days. all sales of the sdk stopped immediately. existing junaio channels and the junaio app were deactivated on december 15 2015. the metaio brand quietly disappeared from the web. apple did not publicly explain what it bought metaio for until arkit landed at wwdc in june 2017. the lineage was obvious to anyone who had read metaio's research papers on slam tracking and image recognition.

~ the record ~

~ how it was built ~

metaio's sdk handled the unglamorous part of ar: figuring out where a phone is, what it is looking at, and how to keep a 3d object glued to a real surface as the phone moves. that meant simultaneous localization and mapping plus image-target recognition plus 3d model rendering against a live camera feed. for the era it was solid engineering. the sdk shipped for ios, android, windows, and through unity. developers who paid the per-seat license got tracking quality that mostly worked under good lighting and on a stable phone hold.

~ the apple deal ~

the acquisition was officially confirmed only after a press inquiry. apple's standard "from time to time we acquire smaller companies" line was given to the press. munich-region engineers were brought into the cupertino fold. some stayed in germany. the metaio website redirected to a brief shutdown notice for paying customers about transition timelines. the sdk transition window was six months. after december 15 2015, the metaio brand was effectively gone.

~ how the technology survived as arkit ~

when arkit shipped at wwdc 2017, the slam pipeline that locked virtual objects onto floors and tables behaved a lot like metaio's old demos. apple never publicly credited metaio. but the technical genealogy is hard to miss for anyone who had used the junaio sdk. metaio is one of the cases where the acquired company effectively became a platform feature inside someone else's operating system. the consumer name died. the consumer use case, of pointing a phone at a chair and seeing a different chair, is now native ios.

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