Campfire 3D vs Duckie

About

Campfire 3D is a mixed reality collaboration platform headquartered in San Francisco, California, and backed by Y Combinator. Founded to address the workflow friction that hardware design and engineering teams experience when reviewing CAD models and 3D prototypes remotely, Campfire provides a purpose-built MR system that allows distributed teams to view and interact with life-size 3D holographic models of physical products in real-world space. The Campfire system includes a proprietary headset and a companion display (The Campfire) designed for conference room use, enabling both headset-wearing and display-viewing participants to engage with the same 3D model simultaneously without requiring all attendees to wear headsets.\n\nCampfire's core use case is design review—the recurring process where cross-functional teams assess hardware prototypes at various stages of product development. Traditional design review for physical products requires expensive physical prototypes or interpretation of 2D drawings; Campfire allows engineers, designers, and executives to walk around a life-size holographic version of a product before the first physical part is manufactured. The platform supports import from major CAD formats including CATIA, SolidWorks, and PTC Creo, and integrates with PLM systems used in aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics, and medical device design workflows.\n\nCampfire 3D competes with PTC Vuforia, Scope AR, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides in the industrial mixed reality space. Its combined hardware-software system and focus on the design review workflow specifically—rather than general MR authoring or field service—positions it as a specialist tool for product development teams in asset-intensive industries. For hardware-first companies seeking to reduce prototype cycles, enable distributed design collaboration, and bring spatial 3D review into standard engineering workflows, Campfire 3D addresses a well-defined and underserved pain point.