6D.ai is building AR tech that crowdsources a 3D mesh of the world

The problems that augmented reality startups aim to solve often seem trivial. Just as the HBO show Silicon Valley skewered the industry's obsession with placing digital mustaches precisely on people's faces, the problem of allowing multiple phones to know where exactly your coffee table is could seem pretty laughable. But with augmented reality, things can get complicated and consequential rather quickly. What's more interesting is that all of this can be done in the background so that while users are playing an AR game with a passive camera feed -- something similar to Pokémon GO -- they could also be gathering rich 3D data of the environments that they're navigating. "One of the big things holding back engaging AR is for content to feel like it's actually physically part of the world," CEO Matt Miesnieks told TechCrunch in an interview.