Case Study · AfterNow · Prez 1.x · 2018–2020
AN-Prez — Mixed Reality Presentations
Zoom in mixed reality, built before anyone called the category spatial computing. Shipped on the Microsoft Store, ran with Fortune 500 clients, and extended from HoloLens to Quest, iOS and Android.
What It Was
AN-Prez was a mixed-reality presentation and collaboration platform — effectively Zoom in mixed reality. Several people put on headsets and join the same meeting, each represented by an avatar. Move your hand with the controller and the avatar's hand moves in the shared space.
The part that mattered was the canvas. 3D models, images and video were placed freely in physical space rather than arranged on slides, and location triggers anchored content to real objects — walk up to a physical product and the section about that product begins. Presentations ran fully automatic for an unattended showroom, or entirely on the presenter's command when the room mattered.
It was also a no-code authoring tool, not just a viewer. Drag and drop, ready-made 3D assets, and customers building their own presentations without us.
Where It Ran
HoloLens 1 and 2, Oculus Quest, iOS, Android and Magic Leap. Published on the Microsoft Store, which for enterprise clients was the difference between a demo and something their IT department could actually distribute across a device fleet.
AfterNow was an official Microsoft Mixed Reality partner with a direct line to the HoloLens team, and part of Oculus Launch Pad.
Who Used It
Fortune 500 and Fortune 50 companies across healthcare, aeronautics, food, telecoms, entertainment and education. Client names are under NDA.
The work was covered by Variety, TechCrunch, Mashable, VentureBeat, VRScout, CNet, UploadVR and NextReality.
My Part
I contributed to AN-Prez as a mixed-reality developer between December 2018 and September 2020. I was not the product owner, and this page is deliberate about that.
It is also deliberate about which product it describes. My era is Prez 1.x. Prez 2.0 was announced in October 2022, more than two years after I left — the App Lab beta, the hand and controller menus, the environment editor, element locking and snapping, reactions in live presentations, and the desktop builds all belong to a team I was not part of. Anyone researching AN-Prez today reads the 2.0 product, so the version boundary is worth stating rather than leaving to be assumed.
What I Took From It
In spatial computing the temptation is always to port the old format into the new medium. Slides, but floating. Documents, but on a wall.
The moment the product got good was the moment we stopped asking how to show a slide in 3D and started asking what a physical room can do that a screen can't. That reframing is the whole lesson, and it has outlived the hardware.
Worth naming what this was not: there was no model layer. 2018 to 2020 spatial computing meant Unity and C#, marker and spatial tracking, and no generative models anywhere in the stack. The problems were rendering budgets and hardware constraints, not prompts and evals.
