Paztec AR

Eight years turning “you’ll have to imagine it” into “look, it’s right there.”

I co-founded Paztec and ran it as CEO/CTO, scaling the team from zero to eight. We built industrial augmented reality before the phones were really ready for it — buildings before they were built, products before they shipped, and the hidden systems inside both. Bouygues Construction and Eiffage both commissioned us — for Eiffage, interactive 360° presentations of two of their metal bridges, in Iraq and Angola, rendered before they were built so the firm could ship them inside its call-for-tenders bids. Rolex invited us to their Geneva headquarters to explore an AR watch-servicing concept. That’s the calibre of company that sought us out. And one app suite alone helped its client win a contract worth €5M.

The product line nobody could see yet — €5M.

SEA abrasives (2014–2017) | We modeled this manufacturer’s entire product range — ~200 products in 3D, with animated exploded views, every packaging variant, and custom animations — and built an in-aisle AR tool: a retailer could assemble any combination of products and preview the finished display, at real scale, standing in their own store. Their sales team used it at trade expos and in day-to-day reseller visits. A small company, it then won a national distribution contract with a major hardware retailer against a CAC40 incumbent — and credited our apps with making the difference. They put the incremental return at €5M.

A building, in the room, before the first stone.

Bouygues Construction Île-de-France (2014) | We shipped an iPad app that let Bouygues present a future office building as part of a bid for an architectural call for tenders: the construction animated phase by phase, with tappable hotspots surfacing detail on the structure. The building they were pitching existed — full-scale and explorable — before ground was broken.

From rendering to running building.

Pavillon du tourisme de Vienne (2015) | One project ran the full arc, and all of it shipped. First, a promotional app of the future building, with news pushed live to mobile from a back-office we built. Then, during construction, an on-site AR walkthrough — the finished structure superimposed on the active site, used with tablets for the official public unveiling. Finally, a maintenance digital twin of the completed building, every piece of equipment carrying its documentation and intervention history in one spatial interface.

Where it started — and a clean sweep.

Canopea · Solar Decathlon Europe (2012) | Our very first client — the project we incorporated Paztec to invoice. Canopea’s full-scale prototype apartment stood on the ground in a Madrid park, but it was designed for the top of a tower in Grenoble, so visitors couldn’t see the one thing that sold it: the view. We built an iPad app that gave it back — panoramic renders of the real height, plus hotspots that taught each design and engineering choice in interactive 3D, on the spot. Team Rhône-Alpes won the 2012 Solar Decathlon Europe outright, and placed first in Communication & Social Awareness — the part our app powered.