Op-Ed: Why are AR companies dropping like flies?

I revisit Augmented Reality providers every now and then. Mostly it’s when a client comes knocking.

The last time I looked at AR, was this month itself, to start work on a platform for Cinematic augmented movies and stories. I’ve settled on one flavor of AR. and in doing so, came this profound realization — many current AR startups and established providers will go bankrupt because of this particular AR solution, but they’ll also fall…for variations of this singular reason: Entitlement.

How this flavor of AR will put proprietary offerings out of business, we’ll look at a little later in this essay, but first let’s look at what the state of AR adoption entails.

Blippar Falls:

By now, everyone in the industry has come to know of the fall of Blippar — the darling of AR unicorns with funding of over a hundred million dollars. It’s founder even has a romanticized slumdog millionaire story attached. But, when I visited Blippar’s site, looking for pricing and offerings, the first thing that put me off were these immortal words “Please contact us so we can provide you with a quote…” To the average agency creative head, such language is not out of place, however to any savvy digital agency where digital natives are part of the creative-tech pool, it sends out a red flag.

Why?

For a simple reason: If you have a software based “authoring solution” and you can’t have costs printed upfront, then it shows you are either:

• Trying to milk a paying client for what they’re worth, or,
• Unsure of what space in the AR eco-system you want to occupy.

What if Adobe said you can use Photoshop… but pricing would depend on the finished artwork you create with it. While it’s certainly fair to put a price to features of a software (plugins/features), the key to mass adoption is to SPELL it out, upfront in a table. “Contact us for pricing” is the age old middleman strategy of wanting to snare a client and then adapt pricing based on who the client is.

They do offer pricing via LAYAR, an AR platform which existed fairly early in the age of AR and taken over by Blippar. The founders of Layar wanted to buy it back citing lack of vision and strategy by Blippar. This article by Business Insider confirms my thinking of the same. Monthly and yearly “royalty” like pricing is unfeasible when offering clients who would prefer a one off payment when they contract a third party AR developer and also after end users have gone through the trouble of downloading an app.

Imagine an AR business card becoming unusable, because the client didn’t pay $500 the next year

I passed…

Vuforia: Predicting a fall

Above are terms for the “Developer Agreement” dated June 6th 2018, for PTC’s Vuforia. Mind you, it says developer agreement which makes the above highlighted section even more confusing. Am I giving rights to use my content while evaluating if their platform is suitable for my project? I’ll stand corrected if I am misinterpreting the terminology in this op-ed.

Here’s the other disturbing part, below:

No! I do not want you auditing any books up to 18 months later.
Solution: Either make a Developer Agreement/Licence free to evaluate without such ambiguous terms stuffed in, or put a price, upfront. To give Vuforia some credit — unlike, Blippar, Vuforia have a table of pricing for finished, commercial apps created with their platform, here.

But, as we’ll see… even this is not a sustainable model, when Google’s ARCore and Apple’s ARkit allow far better usage scenarios and are on their way to making proprietary AR solutions (SLAM, fiducial marker, POS tech etc) obsolete or far more affordable.

Learn from AMIRE:

Why don’t I have much respect from what I can only call “entitled” AR providers, is this:

• They have equal responsibility in driving household adoption of AR via user friendly and pocket friendly terms.
• One high profile fall — Blippar in this case — creates a setback for the whole AR industry. (Let’s not get into Imax’s doomed idea of LBVR based on repackaging home VR offerings)

AMIRE, based on ARtookit, showed circa 2008, how to author Augmented Reality with intuition that is missing from some high profile AR authoring solutions even today. Advanced math operations, logic trees etc. were created visually with AMIRE ‘gems’. This is how AR should be democratized (even monetized) as a technology and medium of communication.

It’s beyond the scope of this Op-ed to go into why Governments and organizations in emerging cash rich MiddleEast and South Asia spend (waste) money on wanting to build tech labs and launch and fund incubator startups, but end up wasting money without having the right people in place to guide such efforts as the EU did when funding projects such as AMIRE.

A special acknowledgement to Daqri, who later bought ARtoolkit and released it to the public. This brings us to the killer AR platform that will put many proprietary solutions out of business.

WEB AR: Cross platform Augmented Reality.

Why am I hedging my bets on WebAR? Answer: Cross platform and no fuss implementation. I’ve been blaming AR platforms for restrictive practices, but the grand daddy of wall gardening is none other than Apple and their ARkit.

Google’s ARCore works on android, Apple’s ARKit works on iOS. However, unlike Apple, Google’s ARCore also works on iOS platforms. It’s commendable that authoring solutions such as the versatile game engine UNITY 3D, allow some degree of universal compatibility for these two operating systems (Android and iOS) by cleverly targeting the correct flavor of AR SDK (software development kit) to each platform. But the problem remains:

For an end-user to enjoy the same experience regardless of the OS of their phone, they have to download an app for their device

This is indeed a painful proposition for AR development as well.

…Enter WEB AR.

A device agnostic flavor of Augmented Reality that runs in a web browser. Thanks to the efforts of those working tirelessly in bringing WebAR to life. Special mentions need to be made to the creators of AR.js, AFrame and emerging web AR API developers. This is the platform I’m homed in for the AR films project.

WEBAR: A cautionary tale… 8th Wall(ed) Garden?

8thWall has beat both Google and Apple to the WebAR market. They are the real solution I need to the delivery platform I’m building for Cinematic AR. So what’s the problem?

They seem to be heading, in my opinion, in the same direction that Blippar has. It’s their pricing strategy. I don’t think it’s sustainable. $99 per month plus a CPV (cost per view) is alright for enterprise clients promoting an AR experience tied in to a product launch or indeed, seeing Spiderman walking in your living room… it will only be a matter of time (in months perhaps), before Aframe, AR.js or ARCore gets feature recognition and marker-less tracking inducted into WebAR.

Web AR’s biggest strength is the fact that end consumers don’t need to download any custom ‘app’ for iOS or Android and can experience Augmented Reality via a modern cell phone web browser. While the temptation to milk the market with first mover advantage is there, I think 8th Wall could gain market share by re-evaluating their pricing strategy.

Let this essay be a cautionary tale to AR startups: Focus more on end consumer adoption and democratization, than building a short lived enterprise client roster.

Originally published at realvision.ae