From Shared AR to the Real World Web

How It Started

We originally formed in 2019 to do shared AR for Warhammer. The first prototype came from community member phlogios, and the big technical headache was simple to say but hard to solve: “How can we get two devices to have a shared understanding of where they are in space down to the centimeter?”

GPS doesn’t work indoors, and it’s nowhere near precise enough. So we invented instant calibration: one phone shows the AR scene, the other just scans the screen and snaps into the same coordinate system in a second. That result helped us close about $20M in seed funding.

Then we asked: if AR glasses and robots are coming, what does the internet need?

The Real World Web in One Sentence

We describe what we’re building like this: “The real world web allows digital devices to browse physical locations, making them navigable, searchable and accessible to AI.”

Instead of every robot or app maintaining its own private map, venues host their own “domains”:

• A domain is like a website for a place
• It’s a collaboratively editable 3D map
• It lives on hardware the venue or community controls
• Phones, glasses and robots connect to it through our network

This is what you saw at WOW Summit: a humanoid arriving at a venue it had never seen, spotting a marker, downloading the domain from the network and navigating on its own. The map wasn’t baked into the robot – it was externalized.

The Six Layers and Why We Started at the Bottom

We think general-purpose embodied AI needs six layers:

1. Locomotion (don’t fall over)
2. Manipulation (move stuff)
3. Spatial semantic perception (what/where)
4. Mapping (object permanence)
5. Positioning (where am I in the map?)
6. Applications (tasks: “empty trash”, “stock shelves”…)

Most humanoid companies are stuck on 1–2. We started at 3–5, because a pair of glasses is really just a robot with no arms and legs, so is a phone.

Phones and glasses already have the sensors; that lets us deploy physical AI copilots now, and bring robots in later using the same domains and apps.

Phones, Glasses, Robots: Same Network

Phones – Cactus
Cactus lets retailers:

• Scan a store, build a 3D twin with products pinned in space
• Get spatial heat maps of what actually sells where
• Use AR navigation to find products and optimized routes for big baskets

Early results: up to 40% less walking for click-and-collect staff. We’re already going live in 1,000+ locations, with millions in pilot revenue and an open pipeline > $150M.

Glasses – Mentra Live
We’re working with Mentra to give their open, programmable smart glasses spatial awareness via domains. Think: “Every white collar job got an AI copilot. We believe the same will happen for physical labor.”

Front-of-house reports an issue; warehouse staff get AR directions straight to the right shelf, even on day one.

Robots – Plugging In
Special-purpose robots and humanoids connect to the same domains and apps that phones and glasses use. We’re already integrated or integrating with Unitree, EngineAI, PadBot, Slamtec, and others.

Medium term, our six-step plan is:

1. Build the real world web ✅
2. Enable the real world app store (third-party apps already live)
3. Focus on copilots before robots
4. Become the largest distributor of useful robots by making them easy to deploy
5. Then build the OS for embodied AI on top of that distribution

Why We’re a DePIN and How the Token Fits

Most mapping companies collect your data and build a central map. We don’t. You don’t sell your data to us. We don’t get your data at all.

Venues and community nodes run the hardware and keep the maps. Our $AUKI token wires the economics together with a burn–credit–mint loop:

• Developers buy $AUKI, burn a dollar amount (e.g. $10k) and receive non-transferable credits
• Their apps spend credits when they use the network (data + compute)
• For every burn, we do a smaller deflationary mint
• Newly minted tokens are paid out to the specific contributors whose infra served that traffic

We see this as robot money for a shared spatial network, not a bolt-on token.

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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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