Is American Augmented Reality Lagging Behind?
I’ve been covering augmented reality on this blog for the last six months, and have been following the industry for much longer than that, and I can shake the feeling that while European and Japanese companies are constantly innovating and making AR headlines the US companies are lagging behind. This 4th of July, I wanted to examine if my intuition is true. However, since my resources are limited, and I only considered writing a post about it two days ago, I’m far from having a definite answer. What I’m about to present are mere anecdotes. I urge you to reply and share your thoughts either here as a comment, on your own blog or on twitter.
Mobile AR
Let’s first take a look at the sizzling world of mobile AR browsers. These browsers are the closest we’ve ever gotten to augmented vision (“terminator vision”). In the last year we’ve seen a lot of development in that area, led by Mobilizy’s Wikitude (Austria), SPRXMobile’s Layar (The Netherlands), and Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera (Japan). The only American companies I’ve heard of involved in that area are the giants, IBM, Microsoft and Google, though IBM did it in cooperation with Mobilizy, and the last two don’t have a real product out there.
Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis
Philipp studied computer science and history at the University of Salzburg and the Bowling Green State University, Ohio. After working for various companies including KPMG Consulting and Sony DADC he founded Mobilizy GmbH, a software startup specializing in Augmented Reality software for smartphones. Philipp has a special interest in Mexican and Thai food.
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07. July 2009
We are actually doing a lot of R&D around mobile-based Augmented Reality applicatons… for both handheld devices and inside automobiles or on other vehicles. I think the issue you are seeing is that not a lot of public talk has been going on around released software because things are really in R&D mode. Mass adoption of this type of stuff by fickle American consumers means that it needs to be supported on more than a single device. With that, we are looking at several devices, including the iphone, the G1/G2 and the pre.
11. July 2009
I want the iPhone version as soon as possible at any price!!!