So what is mobile AR? It’s when you use computer-generated content and overlay it on top of reality, so that ultimately you’re observing a mixed reality.
When you think of it, AR can assist you in many different ways and has the potential to totally transform your travel experience. For example, I’m currently in Cancun, Mexico. If I wanted to find a Chinese restaurant in the vicinity, I would type in the search box ‘Chinese Restaurant’ and would be guided to the closest restaurant.
Whenever you’re out and about and want to find an experience, you can do that with AR by simply looking around you and figuring out what’s happening in your environment.
Wikitude currently has 500 different content worlds. One World is one content provider who has made their content available in Wikitude. What makes things interesting is that you can layer different worlds together. This is also a differentiating factor of Wikitude for its competitors don’t offer this function. Wikitude is the only AR reality browser that allows you to look at multiple worlds at the same time.
Wikitude has two products. The Wikitude mobile World Browser, which is an app you download onto your smartphone and Wikitude Drive, which is an AR navigation solution, very much like Google Maps. Except, Wikitude Drive takes advantage of AR instead of maps to navigate you through unknown territory.
In order for all this to work, you need a smartphone that has a GPS signal, a compass and an accelerometer. This includes the latest iPhones and all the recent Android and Symbian-based phones. But it does exclude the latest Microsoft offering, Windows Mobile 7, simply because the operating system does not allow you to go very deep into the camera functions.
Given that AR requires all the latest hardware, you can see that it’s a very young technology, which was only made possible with the advent of the first Android smartphone, the G1, some two years ago.
It seems that for the moment, the adoption of Wikitude’s AR technology is going through the roof. There is extreme hype around this service which started in 2009, with more than a million downloads of their app so far. That’s an impressive figure.
And they have more than 110 million points of interest aggregated in their ecosystem. Andy admitted that currently, most of their downloads come from Europe and North America where the smartphone penetration is much higher, but that the pick-up rate in Asia was increasing dramatically as the prices of smartphones was decreasing and the appropriate infrastructure was being deployed.
As with any new technology, I’m always curious to find out the revenue model behind it. How do these companies stay alive in the initial start-up phase? How do you make money when Wikitude allows you to download the app for free?
Currently the strategy is to increase market penetration, to get the app out there and make it popular. In this stage, Wikitude obtains financing by doing projects for the likes of Lonely Planet, ING Bank, Walt Disney and Red Bull Mobile. For example, all Android AR city guides from Lonely Planet have been built by Wikitude … and there’s one of the revenue sources.
Monetization is the second step. With time, Wikitude will introduce premium content. Lonely Planet will soon be launching AR content for a fee, which will enable the user to find out all the points of interest that are recommended by Lonely Planet. Besides premium pricing, Wikitude will also introduce location based advertising. With so much content in the system, information can get lost in the clutter. As a supplier, if you want to bring your content into the forefront, you will have to pay for it.
After I finished my call with Andy, I decided to download the Wikitude app on my iPhone. WOW … it’s definitely a new way of relating to the world around you. Very sci-fi I must say.
As you point your camera in any direction, geo-referenced content pops-up telling you about which hotel is nearby or how far to the closest Hertz rent-a-car. You can also find other travel related services such as booking.com, geo-referenced youtube videos and photos, all vying to augment your reality. I was impressed.
Andy was right when he told me that to truly understand the concept, you needed to experience it.
Yet why then, was the app rated 2.5? Is it that the technology is so far-fetched that people don’t totally understand it? Is it too futuristic? Perhaps we’re not ready to start merging the real with the computer generated?
Andy had a less existential perspective on this. It seems that their new iPhone app has improved tremendously from the previous one, with better downloading speed and improved UI. For Wikitude, Android is the primary platform, and obviously due to resource allocation issues, the iPhone app hasn’t been improved at the same speed as the Android solution.
Hopefully, now that the bugs on their iPhone app have been sorted, the new version will get the ratings back up.
Andy Gstoll will be speaking at a session on mobile at the WIT Conference on Oct 19.
View video of Wikitude World Browser
