Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Augmented Reality: Who's Got the Business Model?

Dutch firm SPRX, the maker of Layar, the Augmented Reality platform, says it now has an ecosystem of over 3500 developer partners. These partners have signed up to develop 'layers' containing interesting location-specific data that objects could be tagged with. Examples of such data might be house prices, robbery incidents, accident prone spots etc. Essentially the developers sell apps for a small fee, and Layar leverages the network effect. The firm has also introduced Layar Stream, a sort of search engine that takes care of discovery problem based on contextual elements in the field of vision.

Then there is a host of other players: Metaio, Neogens, Oogmento, Total Immersion, Int13, Mobilizy and others. Soon you will have an ecosystem of platform vendors, app writers, service providers and content developers. It will be interesting to see who emerges as the Google of this space.