In an era where people are exploring new ways of working and living, the need for new and innovative communication technologies that allow people to essentially be in two places simultaneously is increasingly in demand. A Japanese startup is promoting its vital technology, which functions as a teleportation space.

tonari’s technology is described as a room-sized portal where two physical spaces are connected, allowing users to feel like they are present together in a single seamless physical space. Unlike the metaverse, which is a separate virtual world, tonari is the life-like experience of being next to each other in the same room.

Starting in 2017 as a non-profit social venture, tonari’s initial funding to develop the technology came from a non-profit grant. After doing the initial R&D to develop the hardware and software in 2018, they incorporated tonari as a company.

tonari Cofounder, Taj Campbell, spoke to e27 to describe their technology and lay out their expansion plans as they look to establish a presence in Singapore. With a background in Computer Science, both Campbell and co-founder Ryo Kawaguchi are former Google employees who decided to join forces and start this venture.

tonari’s mission: connecting people in different locations

“It’s like teleportation” says Campbell. “If you take extremely high-end hardware and build the software, you can push the performance of video communication to its limit. Most of the time, we use video communication on a small screen like a laptop or mobile. In order to blow up the experience to be life-size and immersive, you need a lot more resolution and more fidelity, and you need to do everything fast,” he explained.

Everything tonari does is done with a real-time video display, thanks to their solution’s hardware and software capabilities. Campbell explained that in most video calls, you experience a lag, but for real-time immersive communications, you cannot afford that lag. “You must capture and process the image as quickly as possible. Video gets compressed and sent over the internet, and then it has to get decompressed and displayed on-screen — and you need all of that in 100 milliseconds, or less so people don’t notice a lag,” Campbell shared. “We built all of our software and hardware from zero to achieve that,” he added.

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tonari’s co-founder believes everyone wants teleportation or some form of it. “You make a lot of tradeoffs in your life, so you don’t have to be everywhere all the time,” he remarked. The chief reasons people choose to live where they live are because of work, access to education for their kids, and where family members are. The motivation to create tonari comes from that basic human desire to have all these things even though we physically cannot be everywhere at the same time.”

What does he think is the general impact their technology can have? “There are a ton of applications from having the ability to be in two places simultaneously. All the things you need to do face to face but cannot since you are not in the same location are possible with tonari.” Based on what they believe are people’s priorities, tonari decided to focus first on the workplace, then education, and then the home.

Campbell elaborated that many companies have grown very quickly, building distributed workforces. However, the need to address how they can make their employees feel connected and collaborate better with team members arises. He cited their own company as an example — “We’re here from Japan, and we want to establish a presence in Singapore, but we want our teams to feel connected.”

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“The workplace is much more distributed today,” Campbell said. “The job market is flatter, and way more remote positions exist. Companies are much more open-minded about remote work opportunities, and that change in the workforce will create massive changes. However, companies will still look to build cohesion in their teams and technologies that make people feel like they’re physically together will be essential. 

While the metaverse offers a platform, he thinks that no one wants to wear a VR headset at work, so you need a different solution. Video conferencing fatigue also builds up, and companies are starting to use the budget for remote work to spend on team get-togethers. In the future, he believes there will be many more lean companies that are remote.

Campbell explained that most distributed companies seek ways to build better relationships. tonari believes in people being face-to-face, and through their technology, distributed teams can spend a lot of time within the same life-like environments.

Facing the challenges of scaling up

When the co-founders started tonari as their first venture, they came from a background of building software applications. Learning to scale the operations of hardware manufacturing, installation, and service was a new challenge for them since installing physical hardware requires a hands-on process. People want solutions for different reasons, such as a casual meeting place or a formal desk meeting room. In each case, they need a lot of physical work and scaling has been their biggest challenge. It can be a very capital-intensive process, explained Campbell.

Deciding to expand in Singapore has meant the added challenge of certifying and licensing each aspect of their solution. However, they have experienced many pleasant surprises as well. The co-founder said he expected more failures and more maintenance costs, and has been relieved to experience almost no issues or downtime. Campbell is glad that the tonari team used the RUST programming language — which has delivered performance and security and has been less prone to failures.

As a startup, they continue learning a lot from installing tonari in office environments. They were curious to know if it would actually help people who don’t see each other all the time. Some insights they have noticed is that people are much more chatty in the morning and evening. tonari allows people to engage in more casual social interactions than any remote working tool. Such solutions have helped teams to build camaraderie similar to when they are in the same office.

Launching at Leave a Nest Singapore

tonari recently launched at the Leave a Nest office in Singapore last November 2022. They also have an installation in central Tokyo, a large co-working space called “Center of Garage” for various Japanese manufacturing tech companies working with entrepreneurs and startups in Japan. 

One of the Leave a Nest’s goals is to help researchers and entrepreneurs from Southeast Asia expand their operations in Japan’s huge market. Conversely, the organisation aims to help bridge innovators from the country to the rest of the world, penetrating unique global markets and exploring opportunities overseas.

Leave a Nest functions as a bridge between Japan and Singapore, and tonari is playing an essential role in helping them create this bridge, said Campbell. He added that people from both countries could meet and collaborate, and now, companies in Singapore can see how this connection is built without having to move between the countries physically.

The road ahead

Campbell feels that even when tonari started their work, they knew that achieving the company’s long-term vision would take years. You can build many apps, but designing hardware and scaling it is an even more enormous undertaking. 

He compares it to the Tesla journey — they started by building only 100 cars in the first two years of operations. It took them a long time since they had to make each capability from the start. The co-founder thinks that while tonari is not as complicated, it has a lot of components. With each new iteration and application of tonari’s technology, Campbell feels they will have to learn how to scale each aspect of their operations — which takes time.

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Overall, their long-term goal is to build a product which anyone can buy off a shelf in 10 years. 

From connecting workplaces and families to connecting people who are sick and cannot be physically present, such as in ICUs or older family members living in nursing homes, he believes their technology can connect everyone for whatever purpose they want to be connected. 

“I think it’s imperative as a society that we continue to invest in technologies that give us this kind of connectivity,” he concluded.For more information on how their technology works, visit their official website.

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This article is produced by the e27 team, in partnership with Leave a Nest.

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