By Krysten Brenlla
Picture this: It’s 2014, Disney’s Frozen just came out and kids are rocking Elsa dresses; the U.S. had the highest job growth rate since 1999; Drake was climbing the charts with “0-100,” Ellen DeGeneres’ “Oscar Selfie” became the most retweeted photo of all time; and Miami local Khambrel Roach, co-founder of lifecache, was learning about Augmented Reality at Trinity University – life was good.
Growing up in Miami, Roach received the opportunity of a lifetime to attend Ransom Everglades High School as a scholar athlete and all-star basketball player, which led him to Trinity University in San Antonio, where he studied finance and business.
In 2014, as a sophomore in college, Roach learned about Augmented Reality.
After staying up all night reading about the new technology, Roach learned about a Japanese rapper, “SEEDA,” who created an album that took listeners on a location-based journey to truly experience what each song in the album was about at the locations where the stories took place.
Roach was hooked – it’s what sparked his interest in location-based Augmented Reality, leveraging new technology that allows users to experience the digital and physical worlds together in a market that is expected to grow to $340 billion by 2028.
It led Roach to the question that started it all: “What if I can take people on a journey through my life, leaving breadcrumbs of moments along the way, so that people can experience what I’ve experienced?”
Thus, lifecache, an Augmented Reality app that allows users to capture content on their mobile devices and relieve the moments and experiences in a new way, founded by Roach and Sean Fenton, was born.
Serving as an end-to-end user experience for content creators that focuses on the travel and tourism industries, lifecache connects across three mediums – smartphones (starting with iOS devices); desktops and laptops through the lifecache online portal; and a headset experience, starting with a newly launched partnership with Magic Leap.
“lifecache is a location-based, Augmented Reality platform where users can explore the world in a tangible way with moments captured and saved to a specific location,” Roach [pictured below] explained to Refresh Miami. “Instead of viewing those moments in a scrolling chronological feed, lifecache brings the digital to life and into our physical realities where the world is your feed.”
Users can capture moments and upload them to the lifecache online portal where the content can then be rendered and explored in Augmented Reality. The portal gives the users all the tools they need to produce and edit the digital moments and videos they created, so that the user can then share their Augmented Reality content with other content creators and users online.
The startup also aims to serve as the premier platform for experience-driven content on the blockchain, as users will be able to capture, manage, share, and own their immersive moments on the blockchain and lifecache platform.
Think iStock, but all-in-one – and better.
“Competitors like Vimeo or Adobe that support 360-video are not end-to-end like lifecache is, and that’s the main difference between our product and other augmented reality products currently available in the market,” said Roach when asked about the competitive landscape for lifecache.
“Our ability to combine the best qualities of these platforms, where Augmented Reality meets 360-degree content meets location-based services delivered across multiple device mediums, make lifecache a wholistic, immersive platform.”
For the future, lifecache founders have a goal to pioneer what they believe is the coming of the real-world metaverse. They’re projecting national and global cities adopting lifecache for tourism and travel, so that the stories and experiences of these cities can truly be told.
“Innovation is rooted in trial and error – we’re creating this vision knowing the potential of the technology, because this is our history to write,” said Fenton, co-founder and Chief Operations Officer of lifecache.
“With lifecache, we’d like to say that the world is your feed – when you’re ready to travel to a new city, you can plug in lifecache and go on a journey-like experience where moments exist around every corner for you to explore in an immersive way that only augmented reality can deliver.”
lifecache is in beta and the startup is preparing for a full launch. Learn more about lifecache by visiting their website at lifecacheapp.com, and follow them on Instagram and Twitter.
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