Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald signs off his messages with a little joke: “This e-mail might have been written while cycling.” It could be an apology for his spelling, an allusion to the fact he’s Dutch or even a hint at his oddball imagination. Or perhaps, given Lens-Fitzgerald is the head of a company that wants to fuse the virtual and physical worlds, it could be taken literally.
The round-faced 39-year old is the founder of one of the hottest prospects in the mobile space, Layar. The Dutch company wants nothing less than to become the platform of choice for the burgeoning new medium of Augmented Reality (AR). Running on smartphones and tablet computers, AR overlays digital information – text, graphics, games – on images of the world around us.
Some executives in the mobile industry think AR will be huge. While revenues from AR alone amount to no more than a few tens of millions of dollars, that number is set to double annually to reach $350-million in 2014, according to New York-based ABI Research. The impact across the broader mobile and computer industry could be much bigger, convincing consumers to use their mobile devices even more than they already do.
Samsung Electronics used Layar as the leading feature of many advertisements for its hit smartphone model Galaxy S, last year’s top iPhone rival, which generated revenues of $5-billion.
In August 2009, when ‘Wired’ magazine claimed “If you’re not seeing data, you’re not seeing,” AR was still more whimsy than real world. But in the past year, developers around the world have started launching applications that use AR and aim to make the virtual world an inherent part of our daily lives. Tech heavyweights including Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm and Samsung have noticed and are all developing AR strategies.
(Readers with an iPhone or Google Android smartphone or tablet can check out key AR companies, including firms interviewed for this story, by searching on Layar’s browser for “AR by Reuters, ‘11”.) Informed by such sci-fi authors as William Gibson and Vernor Vinge, and Mitsuo Iso’s anime TV series “Denno Coil” (Electronic Brain), Lens-Fitzgerald and a few fellow developers are at the forefront of this potential revolution. Intel’s venture arm Intel Capital invested €10-million ($ 13.4 million ) in Layar in late 2010. “Other guys are about technology, while Layar is about usage, and that’s the unique thing,” says Marcos Battisti, regional director at Intel Capital. Then comes a big – and familiar – ‘but’. “The numbers are very big, it is sticky,” says Battisti. “The key is, how do they monetise it?”
Sitting around munching a sandwiches-and-milk lunch with colleagues in the company’s open-plan office in Amsterdam’s former docklands, Lens-Fitzgerald almost sounds like a Silicon Valley script from the late 1990s. Wearing a violet sweater hauled over an untucked shirt which lends him the air of a geeky scruff, he argues that the question of profit, while important, misses the point: “The promise is so big, we do not want to limit ourselves with a business plan.”
Technology analysts Forrester also see potential for AR to become a force that fundamentally changes the way people behave. “In the years to come, it will be a disruptive technology that changes the way consumers interact with their environments,” says Forrester’s analyst Thomas Husson.
One thing is clear: if the hype around AR feels at times like Dotcom Boom 2, then the sequel will be in 3-D, if not in 4-D. Many of the apps so far depend on where you are, and what you see around you and are triggered by your movement within a space. “Location,” tweeted Nokia sales chief Niklas Savander last October, “is the next big thing.”
FROM HELMETS TO LAYERS
As a technology, AR is not new. Originally associated with the backpacks and helmets that nerds used to carry the equipment for techno games, the fusion of visible reality with computer-generated digital information has been under development for more than a decade. In its simplest everyday form today, you can see it in action in sports TV: in the line superimposed over footage of a race to show where it ends, or the pitch-side advertising banners that can change depending what market you’re watching a game in.
