TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Augmented Reality: From Zero to Billions in No Time

R. Colin Johnson | Date: 02-17-11 | Comments

The augmented reality market, which overlays tactical information onto real-world objects when you point your cell phone camera at them, is poised to rise from a paltry $21 million in 2010 to $3 billion by 2016, with app developers reaping the lion's share of the windfall.

Augmented reality (AR) will transform mobile computing by enabling "zero-click interfaces" that append information on things in the real world when users point their camera phones at them. Eventually, everything from ice-cream shops to server farms will pop up information on demand using AR. For example, retailers will offer special deals you can see only in AR, and equipment suppliers will append specifications and upgrade information directly to their products.

According to ABI Research (Oyster Bay, New York), AR revenues will rise from barely more than zero in 2009 to over $3 billion in 2016. ABI reports paltry revenues, only $21 million, for 2010, but with early entrants like Layar (Amsterdam, backed by Intel Capital) already releasing developer apps, AR is growing fast.

The first augmented reality (AR) game created on the Layar (Amsterdam) platform, backed by Intel Capital, is "Jewel Collector" by John Sietsma, which was demonstrated for the first time at this year�s Mobile World Congress.

Today, the main vehicle for AR is the Wikitude World Browser, from Mobilizy Mobile Software (Barcelona), which accumulates information from thousands of sources for an integrated AR experience. As AR databases grow, these browsers will overlay tactical information on real-world objects for mobile marketing, online search, tourism, retail outlets, and social networking.

The Wikitude World Browser can supply information about sites of interest; here, the Statue of Liberty.

The Wikitude World Browser concentrates information sources for augmented reality (AR) applications, here showing the locations of nearby Starbucks stores.

ABI contends, however, that the lion's share of the $3 billion market in 2016 will come from embedding AR capabilities into existing apps. In a manner similar to the way social networking sites have spawned an integration of their capabilities into existing Web sites, dedicated AR browsers will spawn the integration of AR into familiar tools.

Navigation apps will be the first to integrate AR, predicts ABI, letting users get information about any place on a given map. Other examples include big-box retailers, which will integrate AR into proprietary apps, giving customers information about any product their cameras focus on while in the store.

ABI further predicts that Apple will integrate developer tools for AR directly into its software development kit (SDK) and Google will follow suit for Android, as will mobile network operators.

Separately, prize-winning AR apps were featured this week at the Mobile World Congress (Barcelona, Feb. 14�17, 2011). Winners included "Paparazzi," which won $125,000 from Qualcomm for independent Lithuania developers Paulius Liekis and Arminas Did�iokas; "Inch High Stunt Guy," which won $50,000 for Defiant Development Pty (Australia); and "Danger Copter," which won $25,000 for five independent developers (Kedar Reddy, Alex Beachum, Evan Sforza, Jason Mathias, and Jonghwa Kim) at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts (Los Angeles).

Winner of second place in the Qualcomm augmented reality (AR) game contest was "Inch High Stunt Guy" by Defiant Development Pty (Australia), in which the player arranges obstacles for a stuntman to jump on his motorcycle.