A London-based construction technology company that makes the Atom augmented-reality hard hat, which lets site teams see building designs as life-size holograms in the right place.
XYZ Reality builds augmented-reality tools for construction. Its best-known product is the Atom, a safety-certified hard hat with built-in displays and computing power. It works with software called Holosite, which lets site teams see the 3D digital model of a building (a BIM model, short for building information modelling) laid over the real site as a hologram. The company says the holograms can be positioned to within 5 millimetres. That means a worker can check whether a pipe, duct or wall has been put in the right place before it is too late to move it. The company also offers a managed service that looks after build quality, project deliverables and data on a project, so customers do not have to run the technology alone.
XYZ Reality was founded in 2017. David Mitchell is its founder and chief executive. The company's stated mission is to eliminate rework, which means building things twice because the first attempt was wrong, and its line is that construction teams should "build it right, first time". In earlier interviews it went further and said it was on a mission "to eliminate 2D in its entirety", meaning that paper drawings would give way to 3D models on site. These are the company's own words. We found no separate values page.
The company is headquartered in London, and the listings we read describe staff as working from physical offices. We did not find a list of other UK offices. Its Atom and Holosite products were trialled on projects worth more than £1.5 billion in total in the two years before 2021, with customers working on data centres, pharmaceutical buildings and airports. In 2021 it also opened a US headquarters as it moved into North America, so much of its growth story is international, but the company began and is still based in London. Its reseller ECC Group serves projects in the UK and Europe.
On people and culture, a job-site profile lists XYZ Reality as having about 337 employees, while another directory gives a range of 101 to 250, so the true size is uncertain and the figures are from different dates. The roles named in the job listings we saw include site engineers, site surveyors and project planners, which shows the company employs people who work on construction sites as well as software and hardware engineers. A company director quoted in the trade press said that XYZ Reality provides "the headsets and technology, but also the boots on the ground".
A company like this employs surveyors, civil and building services engineers, project planners, software developers, hardware and optics engineers, product designers, and customer-support and sales teams. If you enjoy both gadgets and the real world of buildings, it joins construction knowledge with technology. School subjects such as maths, physics, design and technology, and computing are useful starting points, as are courses in surveying, civil engineering and construction management.
Website: www.xyzreality.com
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