18 19 ME Awards 2012_Final 19/10/2012 10:04 Page 2
SERVICES | 19
Best Augmented Reality Company Blippar
Metaio
Probably the best known of all the AR startups. It’s done a great deal of PR around turning ‘Blip’ into a verb that denotes zapping something with an AR browser. Thus, Blipp to Buy offers brands the chance to merge mcommerce with image recognition and AR, enabling its app users to instantly buy items that are featured in press ads, outdoor ads or editorial ads in print. The service has been tested in the UK with Tesco, ASOS, Domino's Pizza and Aer Lingus. One successful campaign saw seven per cent (or 26,500) of Stylist readers using Blippar on the Olympics edition of the title, generating more than 152,000 blipps – an average of 5.8 each.
Metaio’s roots go back to 1999, but it began publicising its AR work a decade later. Its core product is Junaio, the free mobile browser that acts both as content vehicle and development platform. It now reckons 15m people are using its tech, and that (by end 2011) 5,000 developers were using it to make AR content. Last December, Metaio made its SDK free to developers, and enhanced it with gravity-aware AR experiences, a 3D rendering engine and visual tracking technology for 2D and 3D objects, which was three times more robust than the previous version.
Aurasma
Zappar is another big name helping to make the UK a hotbed of AR action. It has partnered with Penguin Books to digitise books like Moby Dick and Robinson Crusoe offering animations, video, audio and extracts by pointing the phone at the book cover. Perhaps a bit more interesting was the deal with card specialist Moonpig to offer a range of cards that come to life when viewed through an AR browser. Called Video Cards and costing from £4.99, the landscape or portrait cards feature a still to trigger video content. Other partners include Asda, JCPenney, Macy's, WWE and Hasbro. By autumn 2012, Zappar had more than 700,000 users, who had made more than 1.6m 'Zaps' since May 2011.
In July, Aurasma confirmed 4m downloads of its AR app in its first year – thanks in part to its work with 6,000 partners. It is one of the more visible firms in the AR space, not least because it’s a division of Autonomy, the British tech giant bought by HP for $10bn in 2011. Aurasma expects to pass the 10,000 partner milestone by 2013, and has certainly accrued some eye-catching deals in the last year including those with Universal Pictures UK, Budweiser, Bandai, Marie Claire and more. A huge breakthrough came in September, when Aurasma announced a global partnership with Telefónica Digital to integrate the technology into the range of media services Telefónica offers brands and advertisers. In the same month, it made a big splash by teaming up with Sainsburys to enhance the Sainsbury’s Magazine with AR features.
Layar
Qualcomm
This Dutch company can claim to be the first to really popularise AR within the industry. Its location-based tech senses where the user is and then overlays markers on the cameraphone view. Third parties can make their own apps to sit on top of the platform. The firm claims that over 25m people have downloaded Layar – and that one million are active per month. Layar keeps innovating around the basic tech. This summer it launched a platform for 'augmenting' print pages, giving publishers the ability to bring static pages to life with videos, links and 'buy' buttons on an AR app. Layar reckons that, when readers view these pages inside the app, the printed page effectively becomes a point-of-sale. And because the tech recognises existing images from print pages (there's no need for markers), it is a smoother and more intuitive experience for end users.
Chipset giant Qualcomm is famed for its investment in R&D and as such it’s been at the forefront of the AR space. The firm doesn’t really compete with the others in this shortlist. Indeed, many AR firms – Blippar, for example – base their platforms on Qualcomm’s Vuforia tech. The firm reckons this powers more than 1,000 apps a year, with licensees including Audi, Nike, and Sony Pictures. By summer 2012, almost 30,000 developers signed up to the platform from over 130,000 countries. Vuforia enables image-based AR that uses a visual trigger to bring animations, graphics and video to the screen. It recently added cloud-based image recognition, expanding its local database of 80 images to over a million. Qualcomm believes this can transform the tech. It’s already working with American Apparel on apps that can give product info in store.
Zappar
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