When we talk to our clients about our Augmented Reality solution sometimes we hear something like “I tried that technology in the 1990s in a seminar … “ and it goes on.
At the beginning of my sales career, I was like : “No this is different now, we are in 2022 and the technology, the penetration rate, the consumer acceptance are different … “
but the sales meeting always ends with negative results and we mostly fail to convince the client.
In this blog series I’m gonna try to convince our followers why Augmented Reality is in its golden age and why companies should adapt it. In this first blog of the series I will try to prove my point of view with rival companies' competition and investments to their products based on Augmented Reality technology.
My Series will be like that :
1_ Tech-Giants-Fight-On-Augmented-Reality Snap, Google, Apple
2_ Tech-Giants-Fight-On-Augmented-Reality Meta, Tiktok, Amazon, Niantic
3_ Customer insights and metrics from the world and our case studies.
4_ Metaverse or real life Metaverse how companies should position themselves.
When we are talking about companies working and competing on Augmented Reality or immersive experiences, of course we shouldn't expect Intel or Tesla on the list, today's tech giants like Apple, Google, Meta, Snapchat, BytePlus (TikTok), Amazon, Niantic and Microsoft will be our examine list.
“This is the new phase, we are moving from utility to ubiquity” this sentence is from the report named “Snap Consumer AR Global - Deloitte” prepared by AR leading company Snapchat and Deloitte.
By the way ubiquity means “the fact of appearing everywhere or of being very common” and we are starting with Snapchat.
Snapchat is one of the believers of AR from the beginning and the company is the biggest and constant investor of AR based technologies. They always drive their users to try Snapchat filters and their users create nice filters and share them with friends.
Of Course first fun and then business comes. With snapchat filters becoming popular, I mean popular 180 million try, brands created filters with their products and people started to Virtual Try On before buying. We will be saying that as VTON anymore.
Snap also provides a platform to develop Lenses named Snap Lens Studio for developers to create Lenses easily. In the last three years 11 million Lenses have been created, and the number doubles every year.
Giving a development platform to developers is a really powerful support, but wait for the next news, snap plans and has already started to share its own SDK to applications and web pages. So any company who partnered with snap can integrate Snap SDK which is named Camerakit to their mobile app.
We should go into more detail about the features of Snap lenses, what object they can detect and augment it with digital assets. Here is the feature set of snap lenses
Foot - Shoes
Body - Garmet
Hand
Face
Head
Hair
Local - Map
Environment
Ps: Please check local lenses and Garmet Lenses which differs Snap from Apple, Google and Meta.
Our AR leading company Point for Snap is 9/10. Why isn’t it 10 ? Because they are not clear or not open to create conversation about release and share politics of their technology, They may consider making it free but still they are trying to measure their rivals.
And last info about Snap; Snap also selling a hardware tool, a smart glasses to experience Snap lenses with name Spectacles starting $398.
As the second company I want to talk about Google. In my list Google deserves a special place because the company invested and contributed Augmented Reality so much but couldn't monetize it. This situation makes Data Monster Google a little sympathetic to me.
With start of Google glass, Google made a revolutionary effect on AR but the product did not succeed and the company turns its position to investor. They support Magic Leap as investor, but with $4.000 price, can Magic Leap compete with others the time will teach us.
By the way, the last Google I/O they released a video titled “Subtitle World ” showing small glasses like the first google glasses subtitles foreign languages.
Until 2017 Google was leading AR with project Tango, Tango required two cameras and Google started to work with Lenovo and Asus, but because of hardware necessity it couldn't penetrate and device manufacturers which were using Android OS did not invest in the project.
By late 2017 Apple announced devices with A9 and A10 chipset -meaning Iphone 6s and Iphone 7- will support augmented reality, Google’s Tango project is failed and Google pivot Tango to Google ARCore and accepted apple position as 99%+ precision is not necessity for AR.
Now which projects contributed or drived by google;
Google provides an ecosystem project Model-Viewer to publish 3D models and AR.
With google Swirl 3D and AR will be placed into the google ads.
With MediaPipe acquisition Google plans to provide easily designed AI to detect objects that developers want to augment.
In youtube live streams publishers can experience AR makeup on their faces.
Now google shows shoes, furniture and home devices in search results in 3D and visitors can switch to AR to see products in their space.
We should add Niantic - Pokemon company which is a google born startup, and google is also an investor of Niantic.
With their portfolio company we can list google augment the reality feature set, but most of them are not well trained and give so many problematic results.
Environment
Shoes
Face
Body
Hand
Object
Hair
Youtube Vids.
Known Location
World
And which google projects are dead ?
Google Tango
Google Poly which an alternative to Sketchfab
Google Glass, but enterprise edition is a zombie
Our AR leading company Point for Google is 8/10. Why isn’t it 10 ? Because they do not maintain the projects everybody is astonished. And their mediapipe framework is so weak on learning data, does it make any sense, finding real or synthetic images is a problem for a company who owns worlds biggest search engine and streaming platform.
As the third company I want to talk about Apple; in 2015 they acquired an AR company Metaio - how ironic is that - and this acquirement boosted Apple to leave behind Android-Google supported devices.
Being a device manufacturer and owner of OS make Apple independent and Apple uses this leverage by limits. After web AR quick look they now provide lidar to build a more precise AR immersive experience. Multiplayer AR environment share, scan, save and detect saved environment, cloud photogrammetry, Reality Composers are the contributions of Apple to the ecosystem.
But Apple did what Apple did in the past, they still don't care about webxr support and it restricts web based AR technologies from getting wider. We all hope it will be working with OS 16.
The biggest progress on Apple's side is the new XR glasses, it's expected in the first quarter of 2023, but it seems delayed at least for one quarter. With Apple glasses not only AR will grow faster, Metaverse or Apple’s brand new immersive environment will also grow.
Our AR leading company Point for Apple is 6/10. Why isn’t it 10 ? Because they are not giving any effort for the ecosystem, they only focus on their products, for example still no webxr support in Safari. By the way, it's a known fact that Tim Cook and Apple C-level hates Metaverse word because Meta’s position and absurd name ownership. Because that experts think they will try to create a brand new Metaverse environment when their glasses released.
After Apple we will be talking about Meta, Tiktok, Amazon and Niantic, until my next blog you can ping me and remind me of a company that I missed.
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