▲ VR CREW / CEO Sunggwang Choi

What makes a South Korean startup VR CREW surprising is that it has already secured 2 billion won ($1.6 million) investment with 10 billion won worth company value within 2 years of starting up. The company has no products or services released on the market yet not to mention the sales but only the technologies, visions and capabilities in VR and AR. It made a strong presence in the field with an AR Glass, co-developed with Nreal China, at the MWC21 and featured by Bloomberg. Collaborations were soon followed with LG U+ and government research centers for ETRI and it indented its name firmly by wining Metaverse at the 2021 5th 4IR Awards. 

Nestled in Suncheon, South Jeolla Province, VR CREW set sail February 2020 by a number of the same minded brains who have excellent academic backgrounds.

Sunggwang Choi, CEO of VR CREW, studied at Hansung Science High School and dropped off during his physics major at Pohang University of Science and Technology in order to fulfill his longtime brewing ideas for VR games. As if to prove himself, he won the Ministerial Prize from the Ministry of Science and ICT at the 19th Mobile Technology Awards. 

Yubin Jeong, CTO of VR CREW, majored physics at the same university as Choi and deepened his knowledge in theoretical maths and physics at Technical University of Munich, Germany. Joining the company, Jeong is in charge of leading new methods of R&D on machine learning and deep learning. 

What VR CREW is trying to do is to go beyond the limitation of the existing AR and VR industries through digital twin-driven convergence of AR and VR. Digital twin is a technology that deals with replicas in virtual reality synchronized with things and their information. Digital twin is a must in order to realize metaverse. 

"Metaverse in fact is not like ZEPETO, 360 degree videos or GPS-based Pokemon Go but it must be a virtual dimensional form realized through digital twin. Note that Meta CEO Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella never have said that metaverse is already existent but it is coming" says Choi.

"VR Crew focuses more on practicality by making most of AR technologies like Apple, Google, MS and Samsung. Using AR Glass will enable the wearers to see VR user characters and vice versa and they can touch and operate things in virtual space like the movie Ghostbusters. Through this, we can be existent everywhere beyond limitation of time and space."

Working at the moment by VR CREW is building a next generation cross platform. The cross platform is singled out by Meta and MS as the catalyst to open the world of metaverse in earnest. For the development of metaverse-based educational platform that uses this, the company joined hands with Korea Digital Payments last August for cooperation in vocational training projects. VR CREW's motto is "let's develop technologies we need with our own hands'". VR CREW is developing VPS technology, HumanDigitalTwin™, data set, BCI and IoT sensors which are original technologies needed for contents development. 

As a Suncheon-based startup, VR CREW is ambitious to build a city-wide metaverse platform and to release VR games.

"Visitors to the city can play AR games like they play Battlegrounds, Memories of the Alhambra and My Holo Love. With these as the starting point, VR Crew will expand its affecting regions to the major tourist cities around the south central. Our grand goal is to realize EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) first brought up by Walt Disney and we are determined to do it" <PowerKorea>