Layar – Spime Wrangler

In 2011, mobile Augmented Reality continued to mature and major new players entered (e.g., Autonomy with Aurasma, Nokia with Live View). Several important deals with handset manufacturers (e.g., Wikitude with RIM and Huawei, metaio with Texas Instruments and other chip houses) indicate that more users will have the AR capability pre-loaded in their 2012 devices, but it was also a tough year for the segment's "legacy players," if we can use this label.

For example, some of the leading developers in 2009 (e.g., Acrossair, Hoppala) morphed and grew very quiet. On the technology provider side, there have been a few important developments (that failed to make headlines) in the last months of the year: Layar quietly shared to its developer ecosystem that it was changing direction and there were significant lay-offs in late November; in October, Total Immersion released its latest D'Fusion Studio at no cost for non-commercial use (presumably if the platform was selling well and lots of new developers were signing up, they would not have needed to release the no cost program). Two of the other leading AR developer tool providers are comparatively quiet as well: Wikitude's new platform ARchitect Developer Kit is (as of mid-December) still in Beta; AR Toolworks has not announced any new features to its commercial product line in ten months.

What will 2012 bring? My predictions for the year ahead include:

1. metaio undergoes a dramatic change in company management or structure through either merger with another technology provider or acquisition.

2. Increased fragmentation of market (more difficulty achieving a critical mass of loyal users on one system or platform) due to several significant new platforms for AR being introduced in 2012 and few companies publishing open APIs to bridge between the technology silos.

3. Social AR capabilities (self publishing features or connections to social networks) advance significantly compared with the state of the art on the last day of 2011.

Let's see in the coming weeks what others predict and, at the end of 2012, compare these with the developments of the year.

December 13, 2011 update: Remco Vroom and Johannes La Poutre over at TAB World Media seem to like the idea that 2012 will be the year of point-to-know. More about this as a consumer trend on TrendWatching for 2012.

December 30, 2011 update: I watched a 1-minute animated slideshow containing no details on the predictions of Kiran Voleti

January 3, 2012 update: Brian Wassom has posted his five predictions for AR and the law in 2012. I've written a new post about my reactions to his predictions.

January 9, 2012 update: Catchfire Media Predicts that AR will go mainstream in 2012!

I'll append the predictions of other industry watchers to this post when I learn of them.

Some believe that experiencing art in digital forms while interacting with or set in real world settings will be a widely adopted use case for Augmented Reality. People will be able to experience more examples of artistic expression, in different places and to contribute by expressing themselves through their software and mobile devices. Projects to explore the interaction of digital and physical objects are quite popular at the annual SIGGRAPH event.

One of the earliest projects using the Layar AR browser for artistic expression in public (and private) spaces is the Virtual Public Art Project begun in March 2010 by Christopher Manzione, a New York City artist and sculptor. Manzione created the VPAP by publishing his creations in a dedicated layer. The site says:

VPAP is the first mobile AR outdoor art experience ever, and maximizes public reception of AR art through compatibility with both iPhone 3GS and Android phones using the free Layar application.

Artists around the world have invested in putting their digital work into the VPAP layer. Projects like this one certainly have the potential to dramatically change how people interact with one another and with art, especially if they are also able to leave their comments or opinions about the artist's work.

One of the limitations of the current VPAP, and perhaps a reason it has not received attention since the fall/winter of 2010-2011, is that it is only viewable on one browser. If there were standards for AR formatting, as there are today for formatting content viewed in a Web browser, then any viewer application, capable of detecting the user's context such as the AR browsers from wikitude and metaio (junaio) would also provide access to the artists' work. In an ideal world one source of content could offer all users the same or similar experiences, using their software of choice.

In the face of multiple proprietary technology silos (and client applications with projects requiring wide, browser-neutral audiences), some AR experience developers offer services based on a single back end with interfaces to each of the publishing platforms. Examples include the Hoppala Augmentation by Hoppala Agency, BuildAR by MOB Labs and MARways by mCRUMBS. In each case, these platforms streamline the publishing process for the content creator to have the widest possible reach.

Will they also need to write interfaces to the next AR browsers? What will these platforms be capable of when Web browsers also support AR?

I guess these are not questions on which artists should be spending their time.