January 2019 is almost over, which means it’s time to look back and see what’s changed in the Augmented Reality space.
Blippar is back with new plans
After the reports of the much-hyped AR startup, Blippar, going into administration once it failed to pull together an emergency funding deal back in December 2018, the London based AR startup is back.
The assets of the old Blippar, Inc. were purchased by an existing investor, Candy Ventures of London.
The new company will be called (surprise, surprise) Blippar and will focus on developing an AR creation and publishing platform aimed at everyone, regardless of whether they have the technical know-how.
Google Lens now recognises 1 billion objects (Venture Beat)
Google announced in a blog post that its AI-powered camera tool known as Google Lens can now recognize over a billion items.
That’s four times the number of objects Lens covered in October 2017, when it made its debut.
The growing list includes furniture, clothing, books, movies, music albums, video games, landmarks, points of interest, notable buildings, Wi-Fi network names and passwords, flowers, pets, video games, beverages, celebrities, and more.
Lens reads and prompts you to take action with words in menus and signage, and, when pointed at outfits or home decor, recommends items that are stylistically similar.
Moreover, perhaps most useful of all, it can automatically extract phone numbers, dates, and addresses from business cards and add them to your contacts list.
Augmented Reality revenue expected to be $70 billion to $75 billion by 2023 according to Digi-Capital. (TechCrunch)
A new report from Digi-Capital indicates that AR markets will continue to see high growth over the new few years.
The report compares the projected growth of AR in various sectors with that of virtual reality (VR). In particular, the report estimates that the total installed user base for VR will be roughly 60 million, while AR is expected to approach 3.5 billion installed users.
Digi-Capital argues that this is a result of AR being relatively ubiquitous in comparison to VR.