As promised a more specific ‘commercial’ follow up to my previous post on this topic which was more ‘story’ centric. I am developing & producing a range of Augmented Reality (or if you prefer AR, ‘blended or layered media’) applications at the moment. I have also been asked to present at a few conferences and create a detailed white paper on the implications of AR for government & business looking at privacy, legal, copyright & crime issues. As readers of this blog will know I also lecture, run workshops & work with creative teams to come up with future ‘social entertainment’ based around virtual worlds and augmented reality.
But the purpose of this pretty detailed post is to simply list and try to categorise the many types of business Augmented Reality apps appearing in the market and to try to identify opportunities.

Augmented Reality Business by Gary Hayes
According to wikipedia, the first manifestations of AR appeared in the late 60s, became real in the 70s and by the 90s were already being used by major companies. Now portable computing is finally powerful enough to deliver AR to anyone who has a smart phone or latest generation PC or console. For those unfamiliar here is my simple definition of Augmented Reality.
Information, 3D models or live action blended with or overlaid onto the physical world around us, in real time. A camera & attached screen is used to view the combination of real world and metadata or rich media. Devices or systems commonly used for AR include:
- Mobile devices with inbuilt cameras such as iPhone, DS Lite, PSP or Android
- A head mounted display HMDs (eg: glasses or futuristic contact lenses) attached to a wearable networked computer
- A PC or Mac with webcam
- A games console with camera accessory
- A large TV screen with advanced Set Top box and Web cam
- Others in development
There will be hundreds of business, marketing and educational applications alongside the many 1st generation entertainment examples currently emerging. As usual the video game and porn industries are pioneering the research and development of the technology but we are about to see a plethora of more mundane utility & life enhancing applications about to swamp the market. Combine this with hundreds of space cadet ‘toys’ and viral fluff and we start to see the beginnings of a large industry. Of course the usual caveats apply but unlike say virtual worlds which suffered from too much early hype, these apps are much more accessible to anyone with a decent smart phone, up to date games console or computer with webcam – there is a big difference. All open content currently across the internet has the potential to be used in AR applications and fundamentally in the near future non-geo sensitive content will be perceived as incomplete.
But before going onto my list (which is of course non-exhaustive) here are my basic types of Augmented Reality from a slightly technical perspective but which we can apply to commercial and marketing applications. My presentations and paper have much more detail with specific case studies of each.
GARY’S FIVE TECHNICAL TYPES OF AUGMENTED REALITY
- Surface – The most understandable form of ‘reality that is augmented’ would be screens, floors, walls etc that respond to the touch of people in them providing them with virtual real time information or collaboration
- Pattern – The AR system performs simple pattern recognition on a shape, marker (usually on a framed card in the real world scene) or face and replaces it with a static or moving element e.g: a 3D model, info, audio, video stream or loop etc: You view the ‘items’ in the scene with you
- Outline – This is where your hand, eye or body outline is picked up and seamlessly ‘merged’ with the virtual elements. Simple example where you can pick up a 3D object that doesn’t exist because the system is tracking your hand outline.
- Location – Based on detailed GPS or triangulation location & position/view of the camera/device the AR system can overlay information precisely over buildings or people as you move through real space.
- Hologram – Using ‘smoke & spinning mirrors’ literally in some cases, virtual or real items are ‘projected’ into the physical space you are in and can be interactive with based on cameras tracking real world impulses e.g: hand gestures or audio signals
Before the more detailed list I embed my summary flickr chart whose purpose is to try to categorise types of business orientated augmented reality apps so to identify opportunities. The graph places 16 on axes of commercial value (likely revenue or marketing potential) vs adoption (scale of popularity vs a niche, client user base). It is a starting document to aid classification of this emerging commercial sector that I hope you find useful. The AR types, color key linked to each model is suggestive only.
Below are longer descriptions of my top 16 Business Applications/Models for Augmented Reality and I suspect I will develop twenty more before the day is out! I have tried to break up some of the big AR areas such as ‘locative AR’ and separated them into several opportunities. This is an exercise looking at the marketing or commercial ‘intention’ vs a traditional pure business model, broad approach. It is a starting document to aid classification of an emerging commercial sector that I hope you find useful.
- IN SITU: Aiding sale by seeing projects & products placed in the environment before completion. The benefit of a customer or client seeing a finished project, before it is complete. For example 1) real estate agents can scan and show an empty house full of stylish furniture or 2) an architect who can show the billion dollar client the skyscraper as a model perfectly aligned with the other buildings on the empty site and 3) Customers who want to see what the clothes look like on ‘them’ (as in the Zugara video above and Cisco below). The list of applications goes on.
- UTILITY: Selling life enhancing AR applications perceived as useful. Development and commercial sale of applications such as underground train orientation, bus stops & times, traffic alerts, airport gates & plane arrivals etc: all overlaid in real space. Sometimes called AR browsers as they cross reference what or who you are looking at with anything or everything off the web or like this UPS example allows you to see if your ‘stuff’ will fit the ‘virtual’ postal boxes.
- TRAINING: Hands-on with complex equipment and work scenarios. Using ‘outline’ recognition this allows us to be virtually ‘hands-on’ with complex equipment in difficult-to-practise work scenarios. Bomb disposal, surgery, flight simulation. . Indeed according to wikipedia the actual phrase Augmented Reality was coined by Tom Caudell in 1992 while at Boeing where workers trained to wire aircraft on AR systems. A massive industry for the developer community charging b2b rates.
- SOCIAL GAMING: Both connotations of the word, pay-per-play mixed reality games in physical space. The potential to run pay per play (e.g: virtual paintball style) games in physical location and also live connected betting on sports or other competitive play – e.g: You point your iPhone at the horse and wirelessly place a bet – mid race! (odds adjusted of course) or using basic surface AR you play with others in a new kind of ‘games’ room!
- LOCATION LAYERS: Blended guides to new places, tourism, enhanced travelling or themed space. For travellers just arrived at your city, theme park or other experience you can provide them with pay for tools that will help them take the most ‘mutually beneficial’ route after they arrive. Free data from wikipedia, local bloggers or more commercial entities add depth.
- VIRTUAL DEMO: Display to promote sale, of product in pre-release or remotely via catalogue etc: To promote advance sales before the consumer gismo hits the stores, an AR display or the device/s so potential customers can manipulate it, see it from all sides, even customise the order. We may see future stores displaying the majority of items on the shop floor as AR while the item is shipped to your house before you get home! The reverse of this, an AR catalogue (as in the Ikea video below) that pops up models to help you build or see the product in 3D.
- EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION: Pay-per-visit educational services to museums, ancient sites etc: Pay-per-visit (ppv) to visit highly experiential museums, theme parks, zoos, ancient sites or exhibitions but with a higher purpose of providing deeper levels of information & visual sense than a simple plague or hard to follow guide book ever will. The sleepy animals in the zoo come to life, the ancient fossil is animated into an overlaid Google Earth, the Battle is enacted ‘on the original battlefield.
- ENHANCED CLASSIFIEDS: An AR directory that promotes local 3rd parties product & services overlaid at the location. One of the obvious apps where someone in a city or town looking for a specific item could be ‘guided’ to it. A very affiliate model where the company that owns the Augmented Reality listing mechanism will take a slice of any fulfilled sales. A lot more to this of course.
- 3D VIRALS: Branded company or personal promotion & ads using ‘cool’ 3D toys. Pattern based 3D model that entertains and is spread virally. The YouTube moment as a million links to cool ‘3D stuff’ that takes place next to you. Already we see some AR apps that allow you to record scenes of you interacting with said ‘3D viral’ and pass those around too, titillation, quirky giveaways– JibJab-type, put ‘you’ in the cartoon but revered, they are with you in 3D space.
- PERSONALIZED SHOPPING: Walking around stores made relevant, opt in personalization and targeting. The oft mentioned Minority Report example. But in the pulled model, here you can deliver information to potential customers scanning stores, streets or shelves for discounted or personally relevant products.
- COOPERATION: Service industry for augmented virtual meetings. We are all familiar with video conferencing, a few have dabbled in 3D virtual world get togethers but AR meetings are a game changer. The potential here using ‘discrete’ personal screens is to have the inevitable remote meeting with live feeds of your colleagues, blended into your room – pay-per-ARmeet
- BLENDED BRANDING: The equivalent of hoardings, virtual poster ads. Once given a reason to be scanning outdoor areas with their AR devices the potential to deliver topical, timely and relevant ads or branding into the scene. Again care must be taken as AR spam (like social network spam) will quickly irritate, but like free to air TV, using various sponsored or freemium biz models will mean a certain amount of branding will be acceptable.
- AUGMENTED EVENTS: Pay-per-use of enhanced sport or pop concerts. At live events spectators can pay and then scan their view of the ‘match’ for the latest information on sporting achievement or pop star gossip and of course tracking trails or watching replays in situ, merged over say a static real sporting scene.
- INTERTAINMENT: New form experiential TV and films. Following on from my ‘AR story’ post, we know people will pay a premium for a new kind of ‘film’ experience where you ‘live the experience’. How about one that plays out at ‘your’ place. Semi customised marker or location AR apps will layer Brad or Angie into your lounge, onto the coffee table or your ‘composited’ in real time into the latest Mixed Reality TV show. Combined with 3D viewing technology will make Blu-Ray seem so 18th century.
- UNDERSTANDING SYSTEMS: Creating AR for internal or exploded views of complex objects. Primarily useful in training or helping sell something where physically taking it apart is not possible a view of a car or other complex object can be enhanced. Labels or even an exploded view in real time can help get the message across.
- RECOGNITION & TARGETING: Pushing ‘relevance’ to outdoor consumers – facial recognition linked to online data. To be used with care! It will be interesting to see how privacy laws affect this but in a pushed model you could ‘scan’ visitors to your store, identify their faces, do background links to their ‘social networks’ followed by personal targeting while they are shopping. We all know this is going to happen!
Some examples:
BMW Future of Car repairs
Augmented Reality in Marketing and Sales
James Cameron’s Avatar – Augmented Reality Entertainment
IKEA’s Future Augmented Reality Catalogues
youtube.com/watch?v=V4b4ArHZupM
To finish a few lines that describe one of my presentations coming up that acts as a nice conclusion…
It has been called the future of social mobile networking, experiential marketing and entertainment, Augmented Reality is about to snowball. With hundreds of apps launching onto iPhones, Games Consoles, Advanced TV and your PC this new technology allows us to view our world in exciting new ways. Once the domain of science fiction or super computers this new technology, blending the real with virtual, is now literally in the hands of everyday consumers and business. Augmented Reality is simply using a camera with screen to layer rich media and information over ‘our’ real world, in real time so we can now scan and layer web info over products and people in the store or street and provide virtual, ‘in situ’ hands-on demonstrations and deliver the ultimate ‘guide’ to our complex physical world. Is AR the new 3D viral experiential marketing or another temporary fad?
Finally, finally for those interested here is my Augmented and Mixed Reality YouTube playlist if you have an hour or so to spare to view the current collection of 60 +
RT @LAMP_AFTRS From LAMP’s Gary Hayes "16 Top Augmented Reality Business Models" twurl.nl/ele3a7 great summary
Cool, my last two posts have gotten 151 retweets! Aug Reality Biz Mods twurl.nl/jbyjb5 Top Mkt blogs by Nation twurl.nl/iptvur
Sober Augmented Reality biz post "The commercial reality of AR" twurl.nl/8hii2p + ref/copy of my biz mods twurl.nl/u71btc
Oz’y Aug Reality Launch Insqribe & @nickgonios twurl.nl/wnld0g heavy analytics too! 1st part of my 8th biz mod twurl.nl/2pqixi
RT @garyphayes: Oz’y Aug Reality Launch Insqribe twurl.nl/wnld0g heavy analytics too! 1st of my 8th biz mod twurl.nl/2pqixi
Group: Building Mixed Reality Educational Apps for Second Life
second-life-tool-ranking.ning.com/group/buildingmixedrealityeducationalappsforsecondlife
I’m looking forward to examples of AR usage and AR ethnographic studies. Not quite sure if AR is so compelling within date rich real life situations but that’s just a hypothesis.
@davetimperley better ones here 🙂 twurl.nl/e4u5wy
@alpharia I define Augmented Reality as five key areas half way down this post twurl.nl/6nqjlq The hype has made it very broad now!
The example focuses on making synergy between the code and communication, playing with the concept of the name of the site, the incentive to enter the application and discover the offer.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_SABE2fBFo
Hi,
I am doing a design thesis on Augmented Reality 3.0 and looking for opportunities to push an open sourced educational portal on the web
information regarding the topic can be viewed here
augmentedr3pt0.wordpress.com/augmented-reality-branding/
i’d greatly appreciate any support and honest feedbacks
thanks
Sean
.-= Sean Lee´s last blog ..the social media revolution =-.
16 Top Augmented Reality Business Models | PERSONALIZE MEDIA bit.ly/1fgcAD
16 Top Augmented Reality Business Models | PERSONALIZE MEDIA bit.ly/1fgcAD
Wow. Fascinating. I like the personalized shopping, but of course I would, and In Situ is amazing idea too.
Another good example of pay-per-view AR educuation/entertainment: www.DigitalBinocularStation.com – a 3D stereoscopic, coin-operated Digital Binocular Station for use in cultural and tourism locations. It is essentially an Augmented Reality device, but because it is fixed to a single location, we have been able to use photorealistic, cinema-quality visuals, and compensate for the lack of parallax by presenting everything in stereoscopic 3D. While we have done traditional end-user and installation-based Augmented Reality in the past (www.GetImaginality.com) this use-case demanded a different approach that could be highly robust and secure, very easy to use, no staff ovearheads, small space requirements and complex visuals.
I am working on a project presentation for Augmented Reality in an Enterprise environment. Do you know of any applications which are already in use in an enterprise. And what would be the value-add for adopting this technology.
Hi Tyler – I would say AR has been used behind closed doors in a variety of industries for the past decade – from car manufacturer to health. I am aware of some financial services and other white collar businesses starting to use it for ‘information modelling/sharing’. This really comes down to the type of enterprise though. Any location business (tourism, real estate, shopping) really benefits from providing or receiving layered information over the scene through to companies with complex systems providing overlaid step through guides for trainees (machinery, IT systems etc). As is usually the case there is a difference between Enterprise AR and consumer AR and the consumer side is catching up fast. Annoyingly I have done two white papers on the policy AND enterprise side of AR but currently they are exclusive access from the sponsors of them?! That will change and I will post them here
1 idea: group buying concept coupled with AR augmented reality. Visitors visiting stores and window shopping, will be able to find items they ‘like’ but are not purchasing right now, can leave their comments and likes as comments visible to an AR-enhanced phone. Then other people liking to buy the same thing team up with the original poster and when the time comes to buy they can negotiate a better price with the physical seller. They will do this by taking their phone and seeing the physical object via their phone camera, and the software coupled with details of their geo-location (GPS) and the place they have checked in (like Foursquare, brightkite, etc) attempts to show other people who also ‘favorited’ the same item but would like to negotiate a better price for ‘group buying’.
.-= Mohan Arun L ´s last blog ..29-Jan-2010 =-.
Hi Mohan – great idea. Sort of crowd source bargaining for the best price for an item. This would work well in stores running down stock or sale days etc: But could even work for a new economic model in some stores. The thing I like most here could be commenting on items. So lets say you bought an item you can then leave what you thought of it ‘AR attached’ in the store for others to see your comment…the store would need to consider tagging items with markers vs gps though as items get moved regularly :)!!
FYI – Your “UPS” example is actually USPS. Great example, nonetheless.
Good idea, But could even work for a new economic model in some stores.
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Trima kasih atas bantuanya.
Nice article,Thanks for your sharing!
Augmented Reality business models: is.gd/b48Nz
Great post, I referenced it in a post I just completed HERE. One of the most interesting things is the relationship between the Internet of Things and Augmented Reality, they seem to be bound by the same fundamental requirements in both technology and adoption. Thanks for the post.
.-= dave tribbett´s last blog ..Internet of Things: Augmented Reality =-.
www.FixMyBusinessProcess.com 😛
Good idea, But could even work for a new economic model in some stores.
and i have one Free B2B Website,How we make this Web site to see better development, thank you.
The BMW video is pretty neat. I find it a bit worrying though that the professional mechanics would need step by step procedures for such an elementary task as shown there. Shouldn’t it already be automatic for these trained professionals? Unless of course this video is for mechanics in training.
3D virals are definitely a step forward in the right direction, I came across one of these the other day and they are the cutting edge of technological marketing.
Wow. Fascinating. I like the personalized shopping, but of course I would, and In Situ is amazing idea too.
Great idea, 3D virals is great, Thanks for sharing.
thank you ,very good,Thanks for your sharing!Do you know of any applications which are already in use in an enterprise. And what would be the value-add for adopting this technology.
Nice post and also very informative…
Thanks
I think social gaming will be one of the most successful forms of AR in the near future.
The shopping application of AR seems like the most logical fit. How long have people waited for that ability!
Always a great list to refer back to and point others to, thanks for putting this together!
Great article that I have only discovered now. As Scott mentioned, this is a perfect reference for explaining people who want to know more about AR. Thanks!
16 Augmented Reality Business Models: bit.ly/rFTiD
Nice vid 'Augmented Reality Butterflies' Kinect Hacks bit.ly/qiTuua this would be in my #AR 'outline' category bit.ly/1kSymD
Nice vid 'Augmented Reality Butterflies' Kinect Hacks bit.ly/qiTuua this would be in my #AR 'outline' category bit.ly/1kSymD
Nice vid 'Augmented Reality Butterflies' Kinect Hacks bit.ly/qiTuua this would be in my #AR 'outline' category bit.ly/1kSymD
Nice vid 'Augmented Reality Butterflies' Kinect Hacks bit.ly/qiTuua this would be in my #AR 'outline' category bit.ly/1kSymD
16 Top Augmented Reality Business Models bit.ly/1kSymD
16 Top Augmented Reality Business Models bit.ly/1kSymD
RT @garyphayes: 16 Top Augmented Reality Business Models t.co/rzapRnn
Hi,
I am currently working on a Virtual fitting room application that
could be interesting for you.
Fitnect is an interactive virtual fitting room application built on
the most advanced technologies: augmented reality, cloth physics and
full body motion capture. As a customer you can select garments from
the menu without trying them out at all. Watch yourself onscreen with
a 3D copy of the selected dress. You can control the program by
pushing virtual buttons right in the air.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jbvnk1T4vQ
If you have any questions please feel free to contact me!
Best Regards,
Adam Horvath
www.fitnect.com
beryldesign@gmail.com
Wow Adam – extremely impressive! I have just Scooped it www.scoop.it/t/pervasive-entertainment-times and will reference it as one of the 2nd gen of these types of apps. Is this store ready or are you still fine tuning?
Hi Gary!
Yes, I am doing some polishing work, but it is almost ready! Thank you for sharing it!
@Scott_Drummond @nambor depends on which type of #AR you want? Simple marker triggers 'stuff', location based or others t.co/U0B1hpp
16 Top Augmented Reality Business Models. t.co/OWifen9f
Augmented reality business models: t.co/nwggwQTj