Crowd

Yesterday I was talking to someone and he shared with me his opinion that the AR market seems to get crowded. “Too many AR companies coming up. Too many non AR companies starting to do AR.”, he said. I quoted him from Upanishads, “Out of abundance he took abundance and still abundance remains.”

The first line of Upanishads says that – “Out of abundance he took abundance and still abundance remains.” What that means is there is enough for everybody. There is not just one car in the market, there are hundreds of brands starting from BMW to Proton. Still, new brands come up every now and then. If Honda would have reacted after seeing Ford, and conclude “that’s it!”, we would never had the opportunity to get on a Honda. And if Mr. Kiichiro Toyoda would have thought there is already Honda and lets not make a new car brand we would never have the affordable Toyota’s that sell so many units. People are getting born everyday that there ought to be a market – an abundance.

Abundance

At FRM we actually think the market is far from getting crowded. We still can name companies who are doing AR around the globe. It is still hard to find AR companies in Asia, Africa, Australia. The tone of the articles in Business Week says “Augmented Reality Helps Sell the Product” . It does not say “Augmented Reality does not sell anymore”. It tells us about hope, it tells us that AR is coming up and it surely is still a crowd puller.

What we are seeing in terms of Augmented Reality is similar to the early days of Internet. We are still taking baby steps. We will continue to struggle a few more years. We will surely see a lot of bad examples coming up just like those 1990’s websites. But we will get there. What is important now is to create products that will not just be a novelty but is actually useful. Once we start making more and more product it will start to become part of our life. Perhaps then we can start to ask if the market is crowded or not. For now, lets just continue AR-ing.

Since it is using the marker, and therefore does not give technological breakthrough you might feel it is nothing special. But it is actually quite cool. GO ahead and try it in their site.

Avatar Movie

The latest to join in the AR band is fame director James Cameron [Titanic, Terminator, Aliens ] with his Avatar movie merchandise. If you buy any “Avatar” merchandise, it will have a AR marker embedded that you can point to your camera to see the 3D pop up. Although you probably won’t be able to do much with the characters that pop up, it will at least create awareness among people of Augmented Reality. Not so techie if you ask, but we will take it.

[Photo courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com Avatar poster]

What you should see

On 2nd Nov, Chris Dannen of Fast Company wrote off AR with his article Put Your Phone Down: Augmented Reality Is Overblown. Two days later on Nov 4th,  Robert Rice posted solid arguments explaining why AR is not overblown at all. We are no Robert Rice or any other AR visionaries. Nonetheless, we have been trying out small projects using AR the last few months, sharing the basic offering of AR with people around us in Malaysia. The results, we can assure any naysayers that AR is here to stay. Let us tell you why we think this is so.

Just like everyone else, we worked on the first generation of AR – with the markers. This was in July 2009. We wanted to gauge the interest of people of AR and explore the potential. So we chose the closest topic to Malaysians,  the “Hari Merdeka” (the Malaysian Independence Day) to share what basic AR can offer. Just to make it a bit more interesting, we made it into a Facebook application so that people can not only just wave the Malaysian flag, they can also take a photo and share with their friends. Once they click capture and upload, their image will be captured in their Facebook gallery.

Considering that Malaysia has a small household bandwidth penetration (7%), we had very low expectations. We were happy if a hundred people tried it out. Turns out that our Facebook group got 900 plus people in a week (and this with no promotions) and thousands of people have since used this to take photos online and offline [we also had a non Facebook version when there was no Internet connection]. We had people taking all sorts of photos – from kids to adults in different pose.

We even got a Royal Family member to try this out, which was really cool and unexpected. We were exhibiting it at local university UKM during their convocation. The Negri Sembilan ruler (a state in Malaysia) Tuanku Mukriz Ibni Almarhum Tuanku Munawir, came and wanted to see what was the commotion about at our booth. When he saw the AR applications, he was interested too.

However, the best response we got was from kids. As the objective of this project was to create awareness and to see how people react to it, we went to a local kindergarten and showed this to the kids. We brought our laptops and gave them the printed marker. The kids absolutely LOVE it. They were literally fighting over it, pointing the marker to the screen and they keep coming back. “It’s magic”, one of the kids said. Here is a video of their excitement.

What we had done is the most basic form of AR. We have not done anything as cool as what Layar, Junaio, wikitude or others are doing. We have done a very simple FLARtoolkit integration with Facebook to see how people respond. And every single person of the eight thousand plus people who tried this apps in Malaysia got really excited. With a better, markerless see through glass we are sure the excitement will be lot more.

Most excited were the kids. We are currently working to develop educational AR apps for pre-schoolers. We are hoping to share our experience in time for ISMAR10. As technology progresses, we believe AR will progress much more than what it is now. At our new startup Friendly Rabbit Media we strongly believe AR will be a big thing. If things go as plan, we hope to even generate funding (thanks for the tip, Noah Zerkin) to help one of those optics companies (if they need of course) who are serious about coming up with the AR glass.

So, is AR here to stay? Yes, we totally think it is. Does it excite “normal” people? Yes it surely does. AR apps will only get better when we can add faceAPI or other detection techniques with ARtoolkit. We have seen the excitement and we know it has a market.

Show me the money

If you are in the USA and you wanted to know where did all those stimulus dollars went, just set up your iPhone and point around. It uses the Layar Application to do this Tagging. Pretty cool (not sure how useful it is, but it is cool to see where your tax dollars went). GO ahead and read more at NPR