Augmented Reality: Dead or Alive?

Augmented Reality seems like a concept that could change the way we live our day to day lives, doesn’t it? The concept of being able to put texts, pictures, and other objects normally found only online into the real world seems to have a plethora of potential uses and, more importantly, the potential to bring great profit to the companies that can take advantage while the technology is still in its developing infancy. However, Howard Ogden of TechCrunch takes the stance that this period of growth has already come and is now on its way out, with the concept of Augmented Reality passing the average person by.

                                               Photo by Business Week

                Augmented Reality saw its biggest growth to date back at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, with companies such as Wikitude, Layar, and Junaio coming into being circa 2009. These companies act as the sort of Google or Bing of the Augmented Reality world, allowing users to search for the media that they want transposed onto the real world. However, the problems with Augmented Reality came about in the beginning of this decade, around 2011, when these companies felt as though the greatest profit margin would be not with the individual user, but with large corporations. They pigeonholed themselves into a market of providing a marketing and printing service to these large companies, and completely overlooked the burgeoning market for Augmented Reality accessible to the common man.

                Another issue that the Augmented Reality companies that currently exist face is that they are all remarkably similar in layout and use, as well as from a technical abilities standpoint. Ogden holds that this can work in a large, public market such as the one that companies like Google, Bing, and Yahoo survive in, but in a small market such as the one that these companies are currently in, every company has to fight just to keep itself afloat.

                In an attempt to fend off the expected decrease in profitability, the companies that are currently in the industry are attempting to sell their service to companies in increasingly less industrialized countries, mostly third world nations. The hope here is that the companies can continue to seem up to date and sell their service at a profit without needing to invest in the technology any further, but in the long run this will prove to be only a stall tactic, as eventually even in third world countries the Augmented Reality services will become but commodities amongst large corporations. Currently, almost no companies are looking to bring the Augmented Reality technologies being employed at this level to a more personal system.

                So the question we are left with is this: does Augmented Reality have one foot in the grave, or is it a technology that has yet to ripen?