XR Nation Citizen's Spotlight: MeKiwi

Citizen's Spotlight is a weekly series sharing an XR Nation citizen's story.

OULU, FINLAND (November 27, 2020) – MeKiwi is a full-stack digital agency from Northern Finland, founded in 2014. We have a subsidiary company “Mekiwi Spain” operating in Spain. MeKiwi offers custom-tailored digital applications, marketing consultancy, AR / VR / XR solutions, and versatile services that cover all of your digital needs. Our company is quite multi-cultural and versatile in skills which makes our creativity flow from very different angles, helping us to understand the client's vision better and provide the best solution.

MeKiwi is also experienced in XR technology. We have one of the largest VR-

development teams in Finland and use the latest XR hardware and software for

immersive content creation and implementation. When it comes to AR (Augmented Reality) we support our partners with custom-made AR and WebAR solutions and

serve a clientele of SMEs as well as Helsinki stock exchange-listed companies with

just the right solution for their needs.

We have had the pleasure of being involved in a variety of projects. We have developed

software for small businesses helping them to reach their goals. 70,000 children and young people from all over Finland use the gamified, educational applications we developed for Yrityskylä business village.

Our game publishing studio VRKiwi is well known for the VR game “Cave Digger” which has sold more than 50K units and ported 8 different platforms including Oculus Rift & Quest, PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, and soon Nintendo Switch. The game was so highly requested by non-VR players that we also ported the game as a PC / Flat Screen edition as well.

We are excited to expand into China. Now MeKiwi is now one of the first EU companies to expand to Asian VR Markets by porting our VR games ArtPulse and Cave Digger for Pico Neo 2 headset. Recently, we have also ported Cave Digger to a new Chinese headset NOLO VR. Pretty exciting news, but there's more to come!

We recently raised 400.000€ in funding to further develop our VR business. “Cave Digger 2: Dig Harder” is now official, and it will be the biggest VR game production from Finland.

Cave Digger has a cool community, and we highly suggest you join our Discord channel! If you are curious about how to design and develop games, you can read our dev-blog here. We also like playing and live streaming games on our Twitch channel.

MeKiwi can produce tailor-made XR applications for companies’ needs such as personnel training, prototyping and testing, gamification, simulation- from zero to completion. Thanks to our ability to develop for a wide range of VR headsets, the VR project can be developed for any kind of needs taking mobility, display quality, and eye-tracking into account. There are only a small number of development houses that can deploy to so many platforms.

We have developed a fully immersive machine gun simulator utilizing our partner Varjo’s XR1 headset, which can seamlessly mix and switch between real-life and Virtual Reality through their built-in 20/20 Eye Tracker technology.

The Winter War Simulator fully combines the real world (3D-printed machine gun) and the virtual world (Finnish Winter War simulation). We use this as an example of Mixed Reality in teaching and simulations. The same technology can be applied to immersive cultural experiences, staff training, and to support teaching.

In March 2020, we organized and hosted one of the biggest events in Nordics dedicated to Virtual Reality. We aimed to build up the Nordic VR ecosystem by bringing innovators, futurists, and collaborators together. The event was a success, and we met great people from various industries.

We are looking towards the future and can’t wait to help more and more businesses to reach their true potential via digital applications and XR solutions.

For business requests, you can send an email to mekiwi@mekiwi.org or visit our website.

See you!

Begüm Doğan Marketing Lead MeKiwi/VRKiwi begum@mekiwi.org