We Are Organized Chaos

Livestream of ARLA #3 – Metaio Night On Justin.tv

Augmented Reality Meetup #3 featuring Metaio is about to begin.  You can view the broadcast directly on Justin.tv here or watch in the embedded video below!

Watch live video from arla_zugara on Justin.tv

Augmented Reality’s Biggest Barrier To Adoption On The Web

Augmented Reality is pretty hot right now and is looking like another evolutionary step not only for the web but for mobile, retail, print and other marketing & advertising channels.  But for the web specifically, Augmented Reality is going to have to overcome a pretty large barrier to adoption in order for it to become mainstream.

Can you guess what that might be?

If you said, “Webcam” that’s only partially right and not the main barrier to adoption. Here’s why:

• 40% of Facebook videos are uploaded via Webcams
• The market for webcams was 1.8 billion in 2008 and is anticipated to reach 3.2 billion by 2015

Most webcams cost less than 50 bucks and are also coming standard in laptops so without doing too much math you can see that webcam usage is skyrocketing.

The main barrier to adoption for Augmented Reality on the web is something that’s proven time and time again to be the death knell of many web based software programs – the Internet Browser Plug-In.  Software reliant on a consumer installing a plug-in when visiting a site to view it won’t increase it’s adoption rate. Anybody remember Shockwave? I can tell you from first-hand experience over the last 10 years that it’s very rare if we ever present any web based technology to our clients that requires a plug-in as it’s become a form of taboo in interactive marketing circles.

Right now there are 3 competing technologies in the Augmented Reality space specific to the Internet Browser. (Note: I know there are more but the 3 main ones I’m going to list for now.)

Those 3 are:

1. Total Immersion.  Requires a proprietary plug-in.

2. Metaio. Requires a proprietary plug-in.

3. FLARToolkit.  Requires Flash 10 plug-in which is currently installed on 86.7% of browsers.

So right from that list you can gather that options 1 & 2 require the consumer to download an additional browser plug-in from an unknown source while FLARToolkit only requires the Flash plug-in that’s pretty much standard on everybody’s browser.   It’s no secret that consumers do not like installing plug-in’s to view content on a website, so this issue might be insurmountable for both Total Immersion and Metaio’s proprietary plug-ins to overcome.  Unless of course they have the type of cash that Microsoft has to pay developers and sites alike to try and force feed adoption of a technology like Silverlight.

Finally, there is one final barrier to adoption if you’re using Augmented Reality on the Web.  Making sure your tech is actually working.  This is from the Coraline site and somehow my top of the line Dual Core, 2.16ghz, 2gig RAM Alienware PC is not compatible.  No bueno…