Royal Oak-based PIXO, an extended reality solutions company, today announced a partnership with Al-Habib Trading and Contracting Co. in Saudi Arabia to help accelerate adoption of XR technologies in the Kingdom. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Extended reality, or XR, is an umbrella term used to describe immersive technologies that can merge the physical and virtual worlds, often utilizing a virtual reality headset. Practical uses of the technology utilizing XR include virtual training, entertainment, marketing, remote work, and real estate tours.
Al-Habib is one of the leading advanced telecommunications infrastructure installers in Saudi Arabia. In addition to accelerating XR in the Middle East nation, the two companies say their partnership will help foster a culture of innovation, cooperation, and progress.
For Al-Habib, partnership offers the ability to leverage PIXO’s proprietary technology stack, namely the PIXO Apex platform, which already is providing a major organization in Saudi Arabia the ability to unify, manage, and deploy virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) applications for use cases, including remote work, training, and collaboration solutions.
From health care to infrastructure to tourism to oil and gas production, Al-Habib CEO, Faiz Al-Habib, says XR will play an important role in turning Saudi Arabia into a regional and global trendsetter in emerging technologies.
“Digital transformation is one of the key initiatives of Vision 2030,” says Al-Habib says. “PIXO can help provide the Kingdom with the power to not simply keep pace with global change, but to actually set that pace as a nation and people.”
For PIXO, the alliance with Al-Habib provides a new opening into a rapidly growing but selective market. PIXO Founder and CEO Sean Hurwitz says unified XR, delivered more efficiently through his company’s patent-pending platform, can provide Saudis with a tool to address problems and streamline and modernize operations across industry verticals.
“By solving content, hardware, and distribution challenges, PIXO Apex was designed to overcome barriers and allow XR to deliver its full value across a wide range of uses,” Hurwitz says. “Together with Al-Habib, this moment is the culmination of timing and technology, uniting to achieve big goals for Saudis, as well as for us, as a company.”
PIXO says XR technologies like VR and AR have demonstrated their potential with the ability to conquer spatial and logistical hurdles in the context of the vast oil and gas facilities, both onshore and offshore, in Saudi Arabia, but more recently have come to be recognized as indispensable tools in dealing with the limitations of the COVID-19 era.
Through PIXO Apex, Al-Habib now can offer its clients the unprecedented ability to use and manage all of its XR programs — VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), and MR (mixed reality), created by any content provider and distributed directly to potentially thousands of users and endpoints, regardless of device — with one, secure, cloud-based system, helping to save money, time, and even lives.
