Nokia – Spime Wrangler

Announcements featuring Augmented Reality are numerous at CES this year. When one steps back from the noise, it appears, as it has most of 2011, that the buzz is primarily coming from the hardware side of the ecosystem. In the limited time I have to absorb from the deluge of CES news I can't begin to capture everything, but just consider:

Sensics is demonstrating the Natalia line of products based on SmartGoggles technology. This was announced last week, but the models are being tried on by bloggers so we are beginning to get "hands on" reporting.
Vuzix is demonstrating its latest model of SMART see-through eyewear for AR, here's the piece published on CNET about them
Lumus, which has kept quiet the past few years, is showing its latest model of see-through hands-free AR eyewear. Nice photos and comparison on TheVerge blog
Pioneer Electronics automotive division is showing its Heads Up display for AR while driving
Texas Instruments is introducing AR as part of OMAP, as a result of collaborations with Total Immersion and metaio
Qualcomm is showing the results of its collaboration with Sesame Street characters, Bert and Ernie
Freescale Semiconductor is showing gaze tracking and AR for home medical applications
CEVA announces that its latest is CEVA-MM3101 is designed for Camera-Enabled Devices

Where are Intel, ARM, NVIDIA, Imagination Technologies and the other important chip vendors with their eye on mobile?

One can argue if Nokia is a hardware or a software company but it's all three: hardware/devices, software/applications and services/navigation. Nokia's City Lens, being demonstrated at CES, is a great example of urban AR. It's not clear which cities will have it or how many POIs there are. It looks like its only available on the Nokia Lumia 900′s at the moment. Uses onboard sensors to change view modes (held flat, the map shows up on the screen, held upright, list view shows up). OK, so it's rotation-aware. I wonder if this uses any Wikitude technology.

A notable exception to this hardware-centric line-up is Aurasma's announcement about its new 3D engine. Adding 3D puts the platform practically on par with Total Immersion and metaio, at least in terms of feature sets. The technology is featured in a video spot on the LA Times Web site. This and another nice piece in The Guardian is great for raising consumer awareness of AR. The Guardian wrote about the pterodactyl flying around Big Ben. And a video showing a prehistoric monster invading Paris.

There's enough AR-related news and excitement in the first three days of this week to fill a month!

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.