Six Years In: Builders, Grants and a Lab Full of Robots

Six Years of Auki (Already?!)

On October 23rd, Auki quietly turned six. Nils hired his first employee on 23 October 2019, with a very different focus: shared augmented reality for Warhammer on a table. Since then the scope has grown a bit:

• From a Warhammer table to indoor navigation, retail, and robotics
• From a single app to a real world web that phones, glasses and robots can all tap into
• From everything in-house to a grant-backed builder ecosystem

This update was mostly about that last point: what our grantees are shipping, and how you can build on the same stack.

Floorcraft: Our OG AR Game Gets a Web3 Upgrade

First up: Floorcraft, one of the first ambitious shared AR demos we ever built. Originally it was a multiplayer AR game built on our tech. Now, ex-Auki contributor Darko has picked it up with a grant and is turning it into a proper web3-native experience:

• Wallet integration: Floorcraft now has a wallet button in the UI using WalletConnect.
• It supports popular wallets and on-the-fly wallet creation, so non-crypto-native players can jump in easily.
• NFT-based unlocks: The code already supports NFTs at the engine level and will soon use them to unlock custom skins and items in-game.

The whole thing is open source and documented. You can fork it and make your own AR game tied into Auki network and token, or contribute directly to Floorcraft and get considered for grants.

If you want to build something cool or just help polish the game, get in touch and we’re happy to write a grant for you.

Mindful Ocean: AR, Domains and Coral Reefs

Next, a long-running art project: Mindful Ocean Metaverse, which ex-Auki contributor Romi has been working on.

Mindful Ocean has now gained domain support:

• Venues and events can create an Auki domain and “lay out” virtual plastic in their space.
• Visitors see an underwater scene with a pet fish and help “clean” the ocean by removing virtual trash.
• It’s meant to raise awareness about plastic pollution and the health of coral reefs in a playful way.

It’s a good example of how domains are not just for retail and robots; they can support education, art, and activism too.

Braintrance: A Social Network for 3D Content

Then there’s braintrance.net, a San Francisco team building what is essentially a social network for immersive content.

• Think photo-sharing sites, but for 360° imagery, 180°, Gaussian splats and other 3D/VR formats.
• Users upload their captures, which need heavy reconstruction and spatial compute.

This is where Auki comes in:

• Braintrance now routes reconstruction jobs to community reconstruction nodes in the real world web.
• People running those nodes help turn raw captures into browsable 3D scenes.
• We’ve set aside extra $AUKI token rewards both for:
  • Node operators handling Braintrance workloads
  • Users who upload content via Braintrance

They’ve already opened pull requests against our core Posemesh SDK, adding new ways to ingest and process spatial data.

If you’re running reconstruction nodes, this is one of the first third-party apps you’ll be helping – and getting rewarded for.

OneShot and Mika’s Smart-Glasses Copilot Kits

Grant recipient Mika has been busy with OneShot, a Mentra-glasses-based copilot for physical work – starting with food prep.

He’s released open source building blocks that let you turn a video feed from Mentra Live glasses into VLM-powered guidance.

How it works (in short)

• Mentra Live glasses stream RTMP video to a local compute node.
• A small server filters frames (checks blur, lighting, etc.) and forwards good frames.
• An Auki VLM node (running e.g. MoonDream, LLaVA, etc.) answers questions like:
  • “Do you see cheese now?”
  • “Is the patty on the bun?”
• The app checks actions against a checklist and gives real-time feedback.

In his sandwich demo:

The glasses “watch” for the right ingredients in the right order, ticking off steps as you go.

In the now-infamous “pizza” video, the same structure is used to guide a (deeply cursed) pizza build. Rage-bait aside, the important bit is the MIT-licensed repo:

• You can reuse the exact stack to build a copilot for your own domain:
  • Car repair
  • Factory inspection
  • Field maintenance
  • Clinical checklists
  • …whatever you know well

“Anyone who wants to take a Mentra Live video feed and constantly check for anything with a VLM model, Mika has been kind enough to provide that whole thing in an open source repo.”

And again: if you want to build on this and bring copilots to your industry, we’re open to writing grants.

Rice Robotics Moves Into Our Lab

To round things off, we shared a big physical-world update: Rice Robotics has moved into our Hong Kong lab.

• Rice builds delivery robots, disinfecting robots and other utility bots, deployed at scale in Japan and beyond.
• We’d already been talking about how the real world web could help them deploy faster and more reliably.
• The vibes were good enough that they literally moved in to co-locate with us.

As Nils put it: “Sometimes it’s just love, you know.”

Next week, Rice’s founder Victor will join the community update to talk about:

• What they’re doing in Web3
• How they’ll integrate with our network
• And (if we can swing it) maybe the first live demo of Rice robots running on domains

Want to Build on the Real World Web?

The thread through all of this is simple: we want more builders.

• Floorcraft → AR game with wallets and NFTs
• Mindful Ocean → domain-based AR for environmental awareness
• Braintrance → 3D social network powered by community reconstruction nodes
• OneShot → smart-glasses copilot kits for real-world work
• Rice Robotics → new robot family joining the lab

All of them sit on the same underlying idea: a shared spatial network that phones, glasses, robots and apps can tap into.

If you want to build an app on our network, fork one of these repos, or bring copilots into an industry you understand, reach out in Discord. We don’t do $500 “micro-grants.” We prefer a smaller number of serious grants and then help with intros, engineering support and customers.

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Watch the whole update on X.

About Auki

Auki is making the physical world accessible to AI by building the real world web: a way for robots and digital devices like smart glasses and phones to browse, navigate, and search physical locations.

70% of the world economy is still tied to physical locations and labor, so making the physical world accessible to AI represents a 3X increase in the TAM of AI in general. Auki's goal is to become the decentralized nervous system of AI in the physical world, providing collaborative spatial reasoning for the next 100bn devices on Earth and beyond.

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