Augmented Reality Technology | Mobile Augmented Reality | Visual Search | AR Development

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Augmented Reality & Visual Search

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Mobilistar Co-Founder, Tracy Falke

Mobilistar Co-Founder, Tracy Falke

Tracy Falke, co-founder of Mobile Augmented Reality start-up Mobilistar, has written a visionary piece on Bruce Clay’s blog entitled “The Future of Augmented Reality and Visual Search“.

It’s target audience,  digital and search marketers, are being given a wonderful insight into the future of search thanks to this article.  In it, Tracy likens the current state of AR & visual search technology to the eyesight of a newborn. Not ready for mainstream yet, but when it hits it will revolutionize the way humans and data interact.

There’s some great quotes taken from Eric Schmidt talking at the DLD conference about Augmented Humanity. I also added my own thoughts:

“The dominance of desktop systems in the search arena is rapidly drawing to a close. Their lack of portability, of context-awareness, reducing them to “dumb” WWW terminals useful only in office environments. We’re on the cusp of a new world order where handheld devices and wearables will become the primary discovery and information retrieval mechanism. By 2020 between 50 and 500 billion objects will be networked. Current search taxonomy will fail and, arguably, is already. A sleeker, smarter, more natural search interface will be required – one that enables you to touch, swipe, drag, gesticulate, talk and interact with the world around you. Augmented Reality will provide that interface.”

If you would like to hear more from Tracy, make sure you follow @Tracy_Falke and head over to Mobilistar to sign up to our Augmented Reality newsletter which provides market stats, recent news of our work and insights into the AR industry.

It’s only been 12 weeks

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Since we launched our first Layar but even so we thought we’d do an annual review from an AugmentReality perspective…  starting in June with:

June 2009: Layar is launched in the Netherlands only.

July 1st: Layar is a featured app in the Android Markletplace (in Holland)

Sometime in August: Started to hear the buzz about Layar – coming from an online travel background instantly grasped the potential and the ideas started flowing.

August 19th 2009: Layar Global Launch on Android.

August 22nd: The day we got our API key. The hard work commences!

September 17th-23rd: AugmentReality launches 4 Layars in quick succession: London Tubes, UK Hotels, London Theatres and Food and Drink UK .

October 1st: Buys domain names augmentreality.co.uk, augment-reality.com and augment-reality.co.uk. How come they were still available?!

October 5th-9th: Another big launch week with Food and Drink Australia and Canada and Golf UK & USA Layars.

October 9th: www.augmentreality.co.uk is launched.

October 14th: Layar hits the iPhone app store – download stats go wild!

October 28th: Over 50’000 downloads of our apps to date.

October 29th: Invited to be one of 30 beta testers for Layar 3.0

November 10th: AugmentReality is contracted to develop Layars for European Directories (Yellow Pages) for Poland, Slovakia and Czech Republic.

November 11th: AugmentReality is featured in the developer catalog on the Layar.com website.

November 12th: In-N-Out Burger Layar launches.

November 19th: Attends CaT Event in London with Claire Boonstra (Layar co-founder and VP of Content and Community)

November 20th: Secures deal to develop Layars for a second major company: MTS (Russian telecoms firm with 91m subscribers)

December 1st: Layar 3.0 Launches - 5 showcases including our very own Beatles Layar. Twitter goes mad for it, must’ve nearly trended for “Beatles in 3d”.

December 6th: Launch of Dubai Metro Locator – the U.A.E’s first Layar.

December 14th: Delivers European Directory Layars on time and on budget. They’re scheduled for launch at the beginning of January.

December 15th: Downloads of our apps surpass the 100’000 mark.

December 20th: Buys domain name AUGMENTAL.ORG – that’s gonna be good for something – not sure what yet!

It’s been an exciting rollercoaster of a journey so far and we can’;t wait to see developments in the next 12 weeks – let alone 12 months :)

Latest news and a few thoughts

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Blogs are not my forté, so instead of writing one,  here’s a few thoughts, list-stylee.

  1. I suggest if you’re the head of a large company without an augmented reality presence in 12-18 months time, you will have to play catchup (remember when the Internet started?)
  2. Handset augmented reality is definitely going to be the first type of AR to enjoy commercial success. The ubiquitous nature of camera-enabled smartphones ensures that.
  3. AugmentReality is now taking orders for Layar development.
  4. Our Layar web-service has been updated and improved to serve up error-free, and fast, layars.
  5. We are exploring further the merging of the social Internet and AR.
  6. We have new and exciting ‘viral’ Layars in production.
  7. Layar 3D is going to be AWESOME!