About us

The company

Playviz Augmented Reality is an application developed by Previznet.  Previznet is a Paris, France based start-up founded in 2007 by two former researchers from the French Institute of Petroleum: Yohan Bentolila, a specialist in image processing, and Francis Pradel, a 3D expert. 

Yohan Bentolila moved to a new apartment in 2005. While shopping online for furniture and accessories he realized that the existing tools on the market did not provide a simple or intuitive experience to visualize new products in one's home. He decided to explore what it would take to make such a service available to consumers. This  lead to the idea of using Augmented Reality technologies to integrate furniture into a real-world picture. He worked with Francis Pradel on this idea and it took them 3 years to develop the first version of Playviz. 

In 2008 the team grew to include a sales and marketing team. The company is now 100% focused on satisfying the needs of the Home Furnishing industry.

According to Yohan Bentolila, Founder of Previznet: "Our ambition is to make Playviz the reference tool for Augmented Reality in Home Furnishing. The advantages of our technology, ease-of-use and realism, should enable the players in this market to change consumers’ expectations, and of course to boost their sales.  We are already working on the next steps, as augmented reality offers a considerable potential for innovation.“

Awards

Previznet has won awards at the 10th national contest for the creation of innovative technology companies in June 2008 and also at the competition “Tremplin-Entreprise Sénat-ESSEC” in July 2008.

Technology partner

Previznet is partnering with Sun Microsystems in order to accelerate its development and is a member of the Sun Startup Essentials program.