Correction: The pitch competition won by Aireal was hosted by the Dallas FortWork coworking space, not by the Dallas Startup Week event itself.

Last week Dallas, Texas, hosted its first ever Startup Week, which brought together dozens of local startups and business leaders for a week of meetups, seminars, and pitches. The event was capped off by a competition of five promising startups who each pitched their businesses to a panel of judges. The prize included $2,000 and a 3-month membership at a local coworking space.

The final prize went to Dallas-based Augmented Reality company Aireal, which allows people and businesses to buy virtual real estate in the form of “volumetric Airspace” that can be seen through wearables and mobile devices. Airspace is bought based on latitude, longitude, and altitude to ensure that each space will only display content from one source.

The airspace acts as a box that can have different types of virtual content dropped into it. The spaces can show advertisements, interactive displays or games, videos, and just about anything else. With VR and AR technology gaining steam in multiple tech industries, the idea of living in a virtual world is no longer outlandish science fiction. Numerous multi-billion dollar companies are developing their own wearable technologies, including Microsoft, Samsung, and Facebook (Oculus).

Runners Up

While Aireal was the ultimate winner of the pitch competition, four other promising Dallas-based startups competed:

Kinskii

Kinskii bills itself as “Family Playtime from Anywhere” and combines video chat with gaming. Its goal is to allow parents to play games with their children no matter how far away they might be. Kinskii also currently has a campaign up on Kickstarter.

Glass Media

What Aireal does with wearables, Glass Media does in the real world with interactive glass displays. The displays can be windows, doors, or just about any glass building feature. “Projection-based marketing is both present and the future,” Glass Media says on its website.

Hormone Therapeutics

A little out of place amongst the other tech-focused startups, Hormone Therapeutics specializes in hormone replacement and testosterone replacement therapy. It requires one local office visit, but the rest of its process can be done from home using DIY blood tests and by-mail prescriptions.

Livv Headphones

Livv Headphones calls its product “the future of athletic headphones,” promising wireless headphones that are full-sized and over-ear rather than the usual tiny clips-ons or earbuds common for athletic audio devices. The headphones’ key feature is a “Contorsional Headband” designed to be both comfortable and secure.

Image By Drumguy8800 at en.wikipedia [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], from Wikimedia Commons