Jay Wright (Campfire 3D) on Innovating Ahead of the Curve and the Future of Workplace Collaboration

The Guest

Jay Wright is the founder and CEO of Campfire 3D, a company that is focused on holographic collaboration for design and engineering workflows.

Prior to Campfire, Jay spent 10 years building Vuforia from inception to becoming the leading augmented reality platform for developing handheld and headworn applications. Vuforia is currently part of enterprise software and services company, PTC, but Jay originally created Vuforia while at Qualcomm. There he was responsible for global commercialization of non-radio technologies, ranging from computer vision to neuromorphic hardware.

Previously, Jay had created two software companies focused on the cutting edge of mobile computing, dating back to the mid 1990s. On the whole, he has been a technology entrepreneur building his vision for future computing platforms for more than 25 years.

The Conversation

In this conversation, Jay shares stories from early days of mobile software, starting with his work on Apple’s Newton and his subsequent efforts to create the first App Store. We discuss the impetus for building Vuforia at Qualcomm, the lessons he learned about the AR market from that experience, and how that led to Campfire 3D.

We get into the problem he’s trying to solve with Campfire, and the specific strategy he’s pursuing. We go on to discuss his perspective on the AR hardware efforts at Facebook and Apple, and the historical clues about how quickly we can expect general purpose consumer smartglasses to arrive.

Jay shares a lot of wisdom about entrepreneurship and AR.

It’s worth noting when we recorded this interview, Facebook was still named Facebook, and Meta referred to an early entrant building productivity-focused headworn AR. They shut down a few years back.

Jason McDowallAR smartglasses, hardware, enterprise, collaboration