The reality of Augmented Reality

Last night's Mashup Mixer Event on Augmented Reality was a refreshing change on so many AR events right now - it was realistic about the industry! Speakers Nick Brown (ex Sky CTO) and Andrew Elia of Crossplatform discussed AR today and in the near future from the point of view of (brace yourself) making money.

Now AR has been around for at least 20 years, and MIT has been playing with mobile AR for at least 10 years. The current AR hype is because of the emergence of the first smartphones that are vaguely powerful enough to handle it. However, as the Crossplatform guys pointed out, the smartphone market of today is:

- Small (ie the value to advertisers is still relatively low)
- Fragmented (ie what works on one phone is expensive to make work on another)
- Non-standardised (high costs of building a service)
- Smartphones are powerful, but not that powerful

Standard story for mobile applications over the last 10 years, then. To these analyses we would add the following points:

- on-phone real estate is just not big enough yet for the "location based mass billboard Ads" envisaged by all the apostles.
- because of this, services will be "pull" services of "thin data", not push of volumes of commercial data

In other words, valuable niche services and games are more likely to be the ones that succeed in the early days.

The Crossplatform team believe that in the short term, Ad driven AR will mainly be driven by interactive and digital TV markets as they have the volumes and reach.

The rest of the talk was about how to design AR proposals for overall campaigns, and how to justify its business case. They ended with a plea for AR developers to think about performance metrics from the get go, or it will be very hard to get the services taken up by commercial entities.

(The Broadsight report on The Future of Augmented Reality will be available mid February)