Frequently Asked Questions

Company FAQs

ARtGlass is the leading wearable augmented reality (AR) technology company in the cultural heritage field. We provide managed services to create unique experiences that bring stories to life in a variety of environments, from art museums to mountaintop ruins to archaeological sites. We package our software and services to deploy engaging, educational, and exciting tours on AR smartglasses, tablets, and cell phones.

ARtGlass provides end-to-end AR experience creation services including consultation, design, and implementation. Our team – with the input of our clients and key stakeholders – manages the ideation, design, production, hardware consultation, tour build, staff training, experience launch, and evaluation aspects of an AR experience. We work closely with our clients to ensure that we achieve their vision of an AR experience at their site(s).

ARtGlass is the world’s leading provider of long-form, sustained deployment AR tour experiences in the cultural sector. Using our proprietary software and pioneering learnings, we enable a broad range of cultural attractions and historic sites to deploy intellectually and emotionally impactful and interactive experiences on wearables and handhelds to millions of visitors. We have served a variety of cultural sites, including museums, galleries, traveling exhibitions, historic sites, archaeological sites, battlefields, libraries and archives, city centers, walking trails, symphonies, and halls and walks of fame.

We also serve other verticals including tourism and hospitality, retail and manufacturing, education, and real estate.

Our leadership team is atypical for tech. As passionate historians, culturalists, and technologists, our services are thoughtfully designed to cater to the specific needs of the heritage tourism industry. We are committed to the art of storytelling, and many of our tours cover pressing topics including nation-building, race relations, and hidden histories. We believe that helping the public understand and appreciate these subjects is crucial for a healthy democracy and that AR is an especially powerful tool for revealing nuance and truths.

Additionally, we have been successful in realizing use cases for AR in the real world. While laboratory testing is useful, it rarely holds up to the variabilities and challenges of reality. We treat the real world as our lab, avoiding the problems that bedevil other tech platforms and AR hardware providers by engaging with our clients and their customers to meet unique needs in the field. We have successfully engineered solutions that work in a variety of challenging environments, from the Arabian desert to the Italian Alps. Experiences can be indoors or outdoors, self-guided or guided, and as long or short as needed, with most of our tours lasting around 45-60 minutes.

ARtGlass is headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, USA, and Milan, Italy.

We serve customers globally and have dedicated sales teams for Europe, the Middle East, and North America.

We use our proprietary AR creation platform, TourBuilder. We can create scripts, arrange and edit the tour, animate content, and publish experiences within our TourBuilder platform.

As a services and software company, we do not produce our own hardware. We are hardware agnostic and work with everything from smartglasses to mixed reality headsets to mobile offerings like tablets and smartphones. We work with our client to identify and acquire the most appropriate hardware for their site and experience design.

Technology FAQs

Augmented reality (AR) is the overlaying of digital information (whether that be videos, audio, images, and more) over top of a user’s real-world environment, creating a composite view that blends the digital and physical worlds. Unlike virtual reality (VR), which is a fully digital world that completely covers the real world, AR is location-dependent. ARtGlass does not specialize in VR experiences but has supported lite-VR (including interactive 360s).

To create an AR experience for your site, simply contact us with your project idea. Our team will work with you to develop the tour concept and content and will deploy your AR experience. We manage all aspects of the project, ensuring a seamless and successful implementation.

We integrate a variety of assets into our tours to create an incredibly dynamic, layered experience. This includes the implementation of animated 3D models, 360-degree panoramas, archival footage, directional audio, holograms, interactives, live actors, and more.

Absolutely! All of our tour launches are fully bespoke experiences designed to meet your requirements.

The development time for an AR experience varies depending on the complexity and scope of the project. Generally, it can take anywhere from 6 months to a year. We work efficiently to meet your timeline while ensuring the highest quality of the final product.

No! With ARtGlass’ deployment apps, you have multiple options to allow users to bring their own devices. They can either scan a QR code and stream tours, which requires no downloads, or download our iOS or Android apps. This allows users to download the tour to their device and access it offline.

The cost of creating an AR experience varies depending on the project’s complexity, content requirements, and custom features. We provide a detailed quote after discussing your project to ensure transparency and alignment with your needs.

Yes. We provide many options for iterating your tour over time to keep content current.