The Augmented Reality Industry is Shooting Itself in the Foot.
Tags: AR, Augmented Reality, Technology, Webar, Mixed Reality

That’s a bold statement from a small AR firm in rural Canada — but from our perspective, 2019 and 2020 have been a race to consistently name drop, one-up, and discredit our collective competition with very little evidence to back up the bold claims made by individuals and companies vying for control and clout within the augmented reality space. What’s worse, is the position this places the consumer in; there’s widespread discussion and repetition from industry leaders that says the goal is to ‘democratize the tech’ and make it available for all — yet, very few companies out there seem to make any effort whatsoever to do just that. At this rate, the AR landscape will be reduced to chasing its tail, endlessly circling around the possibility of mass user adoption.

Here’s the rub: isn’t that what democratization stands for? We want the global population to accept and integrate AR tech into their daily lives, yet we’re changing and confusing the masses to a state where they want little to do with mainstream AR experiences. So who’s responsible? In short, we are.

We’re taking a deep dive into our personal organizational experiences to present what we feel is nothing short of a massive play to undermine what’s possible, what’s ethical, and what’s around the bend. The kicker is, we believe the industry doesn’t stand to gain anything from this play. This should be an era of collaboration, support, experimentation, and sharing. Instead, we’re collectively racing to a finish line that the AR community can’t seem to define for itself.

The Big Buy-In

For many tech startups, knowledge and innovation are rooted in a strong desire to disrupt and make positive change — sometimes without a clear road map.

“Making something a reality sometimes, is challenging when you don’t have the blueprint to go off of, so I feel that these companies were equally inspired by movies and pop culture and had a passion to build that technology,” says KP9 Interactive CEO, Wil McReynolds. Wil has been innovating in the AR space since 2011. That’s long enough to see countless ideas, companies, and personalities come and go, each with their own individual merits and promising ideas. As 2020 approached, a shift happened in the AR sphere.

“A lot of them were acquired by bigger companies. At the other end of the spectrum, some of these companies have become too big for their own good. They’ve got to that point where there’s a lot of internal bureaucracy and too many managers. Innovation takes a bit longer because it takes a lot longer to work its way up from R&D. Whereas small, agile companies can really pivot in real-time and make very disruptive things that sometimes end up being acquired by big companies. Sometimes when they’re acquired you don’t see that tech emerge for another couple of years. That sucks too.”

Pump the brakes for a second. An acquisition can be phenomenal news for a small company making big innovations. Being acquired by the right group can mean an injection of funds that saves the company, allows it to expand and grow their team or stack, and gifts them time to flesh out the ideas that helped them secure that trust from a big company or VC. An acquisition can also mean support; it can mean access to consultants, experts, marketing help, behind-the-scenes tech that unlocks new doorways, and even the simple psychological boost of being validated by the industry. Make no mistake, acquisition — by the right company — can be a lifesaver. More often than not, it can also have the opposite effect.

Take, for example, the acquisition of Metaio by Apple in 2015. Metaio was a growing team of bright engineers and developers that laid the groundwork of what would eventually become Arkit. Full disclosure, Wil was at one time a Preferred Developer with Metaio.

At the time of the acquisition, Metaio was creating virtual showrooms for the likes of IKEA and was being adopted by the automotive and industrial sectors in the creation of complex visual repair manuals. Apple sat on that tech for an approximate two years and issued a very dismissive statement deflecting questions, noting “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans.”

Hey, that’s show-biz, baby. But it sure doesn’t advance the technology, or aid in its democratization — Apple took what Metaio had built, a cross-platform solution, and reduced it to iOS functionality, staunchly limiting what was possible. Our colleagues shot us all in the foot.

“Metaio was huge, man,” says McReynolds. “They would let you compile to Android and iOS. Apple bought it and they garden-walled it. They made it proprietary on their phone, period… Apple goes on a buying blitz and then brings out its vision of what it should be on top of what the innovators were doing. They’re trying to bring their tried-and-true tropes that they believe are the standard.”

With Apple’s big, burly tease of a release for an AR headset slated for sometime in 2021 or 2022, Patently Apple, a website dedicated to closely monitoring Apple’s published patents via the US Patent & Trademark Office suggests we’re being pushed, yet again, towards a tech medium that’s not anywhere near ready for mainstream adoption.

Dice Insights writes in a March 2019 article discussing the future of augmented reality and Apple’s pending headset release. “This is not what we want from augmented reality. In fact, this will earn AR a ‘hard pass’ from many consumers… and might hint that the AR future we’ve all been expecting is nowhere close to fruition.”

When we take a step back and look at where the industry came from, there were a handful of SDK’s available for developing augmented reality apps. Other pioneering companies, rightfully so, had their own visions of how best to do it. Acquisition accomplished two key things: one, it largely validated the idea that AR tech was a powerful force that held serious potential. Two, it created an arms race that’s as much about marketing and selling the next big thing as it was about pioneering a transformative technology that has the ability to change the world.

Industry Thought Leaders & Influencers

We believe a key pillar of AR’s failure to build mainstream adaptability lies in the way our industry actually talks about and promotes augmented reality.

“A lot of futurists and influencers are people who have in’s in the industry, so they get to see things maybe a year or two years out from the general public even knowing about it in many ways. There are two scenarios, either they’re so hyped on what they see to a point where everything else pales in comparison so they can only go on about that thing — and that’s why they’re always on about the next shiny thing. Two, is the fact many of them don’t have the vision to see all of the pieces and they’re just promoting whatever’s around them to stay relevant without actually understanding the underlying structure of the system. Many of these influencers talking about technology [can’t] talk about the tech — it’s all bling and no delivery.”

AR is a form of media; media is not an authentic representation of reality, so all media is a carefully crafted construction. To a degree, when we see the media jump on the bandwagon and preach the gospel of the next shiny thing, what we’re seeing may not be an accurate representation of AR technology. It may very well be a very doctored representation of who’s got the most friends in high places. The marketing sells. The idea is there. The words are punchy, but — and we’ve witnessed this time and time again — the building blocks and underlying foundation of the tech itself are often inflated or misrepresented, and the user experience is easily neglected.

Having connections in high places does not make an expert.

Having a large audience does not make a thought leader.

Having a revered platform publish an opinion does not make an influencer.

“Unfortunately, it is who you know in a lot of ways, and some of these people and companies have these brands on board because of historic work — but then again, some of these people at the top probably shouldn’t be at the top anymore,” says McReynolds. “There’s a lot of people that hinder the growth of the technology in many ways because they listen to their friend’s friend who works with an AR company and that person jumps on the bandwagon and writes something because they see an opportunity. That creates its own problems…

They’re misleading in their marketing. They’re misleading in what they’re actually selling, and they mislead the user.”

Of course, we’re guilty of making blingy tech demonstrations as well. Our beginnings aren’t unlike many other companies in the AR sphere in that we sought to inspire creativity in our audience, our clients, and prospective investors and customers. We stopped doing flashy demos and fixating on the future of AR when we noticed the competition using advanced showings as a tool to sell clients. At the end of the day, our initial demos and the demos of others were the possibilities of tomorrow. Nothing more.

Now, to the credit of advanced tech demos: we do see them work, albeit in controlled environments constructed exclusively by the companies promoting them. Yes — they’re awe-inspiring and impressive, but they do not — and cannot — scale. Everyone in this industry is seemingly trying to step on everyone else in an effort to get their product out the door — that’s business, after all. But when good tech and practical ideas are drowned in an ocean of contradictory and confusing content, we all lose. We lose potential sales, we lose audiences, and we lose the ability to hook new users interested in exploring the possibilities of AR.

Consider a popular WebAR demo released by L’Oreal that was supposed to allow people to try out “countless” hairstyles and colours by applying a type of filter-based AR overlay. “Countless” was a perplexing choice of wording because the experience only delivered 50 some-odd options.

Strategy & Business writer Linda Rodriguez McRobbie says in an article discussing the “long nose” of AR, “I mostly buy into the bright future predicted by experts — but this isn’t the only unsatisfying experience I’ve had… In its current incarnation, AR is, frankly, disappointing. It’s at best a solution to problems that aren’t really problems, and at worst, insufficient in meeting what could be actual needs (like my fringe question). So why am I sure that AR is still going to be the next big thing? Because it will be a really useful idea — when we get it right.”

We need creative and inspired people to keep innovating; there is nothing wrong with future conceptual POC’s. Modern movies and games are the primers in many ways and we’re all products of our environments, as it were, but how we talk about and market our collective technology matters. Our media authorities need to better investigate the functionality, operation, and validity of marketing claims prior to giving underperforming and misleading platforms and software engines the spotlight.

Unvalidated articles and reviews from thought leaders can potentially create content virality that heavily damages the validity of the industry. They ultimately undermine the efforts of true innovators poised to offer scalable solutions by presenting these flashy demos as market-ready. They’re not.

The Whale & Perceived Failure

Would investment be awesome? Yes. It definitely wouldn’t suck. But you know what does suck? Having the very industry you work in actively sabotage widespread progress by neglecting the user experience and misleading audiences to the point they feel the tech was all hype, or just doesn’t work at all. Is investment important? Yes, absolutely. Is investment necessary? No, absolutely not.

We’ve all seen The Whale. It’s an MR experience created by now for-sale Florida startup, Magic Leap, that showcased an incredible 3D display of a whale breaching a gymnasium floor. Was it sick? Damn right it was. Was it an accurate representation of what Magic Leap was capable of? Many would say unequivocally, no.

In a March 2020 article published by Input Magazine, journalist Raymond Wong recounts trying the Magic Leap 1 AR headset after referencing years of hype and excitement, spurred in part by doctored content like the Whale experience.

“It was hardly the kind of killer experience that merged virtual objects and physical space that I was expecting from the hyped AR headset. [It] certainly didn’t convince me the $2,300 headset was worth the money, early adopter premium or not. I left the hotel disappointed and didn’t publish any story on it.”

Here’s a company that accepted billions in investment from the likes of giants like Google, Disney, and Alibaba, who collectively threw $2.6 billion at the startup with the optimistic goal of commercializing its groundbreaking AR headset. Now, Magic Leap is for sale, a move that Wong says has “rattled some confidence in the AR space.” He’s not alone in that sentiment.

Bloomberg published an article in September of 2020, with a subheadline that blatantly stated “the augmented reality startup was undone by profligate spending and its own hype. Investors finally lost patience…”

What does this say about the state of the AR industry? What good did that hype train do for the adoption of wearables, or AR tech as a whole? How do we make it as a collective technology when arguably the biggest name in the game tanks and inspires distrust in AR? It says the all-bling-no-system methodology is killing us as innovators in the space, and the more our thought leaders, influencers, and media networks place misleading AR experiences on a pedestal, the more likely we are to struggle — together.

The same overarching concept applies to other known industry firms sharing legacy projects. Each are impressive and make waves in their own right, but neglect the importance of building the basement to support the hype. Whether it be falsely touted true webAR capabilities, or neglecting to make experiences accessible to as many users via iOS and Android as possible, these impressive experiences being churned out are wishy-washy at best. They don’t work as advertised, and straight-up don’t work if you don’t have a certain device in your hand.

“I know how to use augmented reality,” says McReynolds. “When I can’t make it work, then there’s a real problem for the user and that’s leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths. It’s not the technology — it’s the implementation and delivery… Who suffers? The businesses that want to use [the tech] because when the consumer goes to use it, it just doesn’t work as expected.”

Perhaps the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back and prompted the production of this article, for us anyway, was an industry-leading CEO reaching out — directly — asking for help making their platform work. Let’s face it, if a prominent AR company that sponsors globally-recognized expo’s and speaker series’ is asking the little guy for help, there’s trouble in paradise. If a company is advertising true #WebAR and a tech firm like ours can’t get their experiences to work as advertised on 5 or 6 different testing devices, they need to straight-up get their shit together.

“We’re in an era that’s all about investment in tech. Magic Leap set that precedent years ago with the fucking whale video,” laughs McReynolds. “Groups are misleading in their advertising. It’s not accessible on all devices and it’s not true #ARforall, but they’re also thinking so far ahead. If you keep on showing the next big thing, the expectations of the people who want to use it are limited to the higher end devices or those who can afford to invest in them.”

How on earth does that reflect #Arforall?

When these experiences consistently disappoint and confuse audiences and investors, guess what gets blamed? We’ve boiled down our perceived failures of AR. They stem from misleading people, being complacent, and not having an engine that works. All that failure, at the end of the day, is evidently coming down on augmented reality as a whole. It’s not going to come down on an individual company or the person who coded it. It’s not going to come down on the content creator or the brand that’s marketing it; it’s going to come down on the tech. Influencers, thought leaders, and companies trying to run before they can walk are building a myth that allows the tech to take the fall for what they’re doing.

The Solution (from our perspective)

Look, we’re not saying the WorldCAST engine we built at KP9 Interactive is the be-all-end-all solution for the collective AR consumer experience. We’re one of many, certainly. But what we’ve done is seemingly the opposite of what some of our competitors have done: we assessed the need for a truly democratized webAR platform with as few friction points as possible and built a web-based studio and portal environment that allows everyone to create, publish, and share augmented reality content. Full stop.

Our platform needs no development knowledge. It requires no coding experience. It offers a free option. It does not discriminate between Android and iOS devices. Last but certainly not least, it does exactly what we say it does. We’ve built a platform we feel is right for the current market, but we always have our eyes on the horizon line — we strategically position our company so we can grow and adapt to the world of wearables when they’re inevitably democratized and made available to the public. We think we have a great grasp on what’s coming, what could be, and what could emerge from those changes down the road. What we’re sure of, is that we’re serving what’s realistically available today — not advertising what we want to be available someday.

In order to democratize AR, companies must build and sell AR engines that can serve the content that actually works today. How should people access AR? Not through expensive wearables and headsets that promise the moon — not yet, anyway. Instead, what does everyone engaged with modern consumer technologies have access to today? Mobile devices and desktop computers. Thus, create platforms that are accessible via those means and a portal from which to serve AR content. What won’t work is constantly showing off. C’est la vie.

The solution is building accessible, useful, practical, and accurate platforms that do what their respective creators say they can. The solution is putting AR in a position where it can provide opportunities to educate, inform, and entertain global audiences, regardless of how much cash they have wrapped up in the latest device. The goal is to inspire, isn’t it?

We chose to build the basement first because without a fully functional and ironclad engine, there is no car, there is no stairway to heaven, and there is no ethical chance in hell of mass user adoption by which to seek comprehensive investment. We cannot put the cart before the horse, and we strongly feel the biggest thorn in the side of the augmented reality landscape is our competition and the so-called influencers and thought leaders who do exactly that.

Look, we’re not trying to discredit, put down, or ridicule any person, company, or sector of the augmented reality industry. We’re all doing what we can to succeed in an unprecedented time in human history, and there’s a nobility in that which we tip our hat to. The failures of our industry, and there are many, are just part of the process and don’t represent the whisper of an untimely death. An emerging industry worth an estimated $1.5 trillion doesn’t go away overnight thanks to a few shitty demo experiences that didn’t pan out with the public.

“You can’t run businesses like you used to,” concludes McReynolds. “You can’t segregate transformative technology. You can’t compartmentalize a form of media, that for the first time in history has access to all information in so many different ways. You can’t take that away from the masses… We’re reaching a digital evolution. We’re reaching a societal evolution… All that stuff has shifted.”