LivingCities, the augmented reality startup co-founded by 6D.ai founder Matt Miesnieks, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley and VFX pioneer John Gaeta, has been dissolved. Miesnieks announced the closure on Twitter Sunday, writing that “we can't find a viable path forward for the vision we set out to pursue.”

LivingCities incorporated in 2021, and came out of stealth in June of 2022 by announcing that it had raised $4 million to build a kind of physical metaverse. LivingCities was all about “connecting real places to digital-twins, bringing life to the mirror world,” Miesnieks wrote at the time. “What this will look like is a consumer experience, ultimately delivered over open web3 protocols as a 3D space, where the virtual world looks & feels like a real place and is aligned with that place.”

More recently, the startup said it was “creating an app that lets people scan indoor spaces (think: kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, offices) and play them.” What that actually meant was never quite clear, including within the company.

“We made the decision when we founded the company to build a consumer product, and not go into developing deep-tech (AI & CV algorithms etc). Every dead-end path we went down led us to believe that the most viable path was to be a small studio building a (mixed reality) game,” Miesnieks wrote Sunday. “This isn't who we were as a team, we know we wouldn't be great at building games, and with a very tough fundraising environment we were not going to be able (to) raise a large round on top of what we'd already raised.”

It appears that the company actually shut down well before this week’s closure notice: Crowley and other key members of the LivingCities team indicate on LinkedIn that they left LivingCities in September; Gaeta had departed in May of 2022 to become the Chief Creative Officer of Inworld AI.

This article was first published as part of Lowpass, a weekly newsletter about AR, VR, streaming and more. Sign up now for free.

Got news?

Want to reach an audience of close to 19,000 tech and entertainment insiders and decision makers? Then check out the new Lowpass sponsorship page; sponsored links are available for just $99 for a limited time.

Image courtesy of Livingcities.