The Mobile Augmented Reality Competitive Landscape

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The Mobile Augmented Reality Competitive Landscape

Submitted by lester on Wednesday, 9 June 20105 Comments

Last week I spoke at the ARE2010 event in Santa Clara. Event wise it was excellent, great to meet up with so many people from the industry and see what they are working on. I have a list of things to write about, but this week I am speaking at a few events in London so still writing slides. In the meantime, my talk last week was on the iPhone augmented reality competitive landscape. A PDF of my slides can be found here.

Below is some highlights from the talk and a quick overview of the data in general. The data takes into account iPhone augmented reality applications published up until 30th May 2010.

Our research showed that there were 338 applications listed as ‘augmented reality applications’, plus we found a further 42 applications that were not listed as augmented reality applications but we included in our data. The total applications included in the data is 380 applications.

Augmented reality applications published by date

Note that the applications pre Sept 09 were probably existing applications that had augmented reality functionality added (eg Yelp) rather than applications being listed for the first time with augmented reality functionality. If I remember correctly, Apple only allowed augmented reality browsers to be published in September last year which accounts for the sharp increase in applications

Applications published by AppStore category

The problem with using the AppStore categories for any kind of analysis is there is no consistency where developers publish their applications. Consider these browsers and their published category:

Robotvision – Navigation
Yell Labs – Lifestyle
Layar – Reference
Wikitude – Travel

To normalize the data we re-categorised every application

Applications published by normalized category

Notice now that Browsers are the top category of augmented reality applications and not navigation applications. We also broke down what each application does into sub categories.
Continued on page 2 – see below

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5 Comments »

Tweets that mention The Mobile Augmented Reality Competitive Landscape | Augmented Planet -- Topsy.com said:

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by JRB, Alexis Verschueren. Alexis Verschueren said: #AR The Mobile Augmented Reality Competitive Landscape http://bit.ly/cNUswf [...]

- 9 June 2010 at 7:09 pm

The Mobile Augmented Reality Competitive Landscape | Vodule said:

[...] Read the complete commentary at Augmented Planet [...]

- 10 June 2010 at 6:47 pm

sandeep said:

sir u r stating that there are 3980 augmented reality applications tell me site where cani find those applications i want to develop a application so based on available application iwant to develop a different application so please kindly providem e site

- 11 November 2010 at 6:36 am

lester said:

Hi Sandeep.

I’m not sure where the 3980 number came from, I think the figure I quoted was 338. These are purely just the iPhone applications.

The number has grown a bit since then. To get to the 338 we looked at every iPhone application by trawling through iTunes and searching for anything that claimed to be AR, and then searching for similar applications that didn’t claim to be AR but were similar to those that were. (if that makes sense). This was all packaged up into a report.

Since the report is nearly 6 months old and somewhat dated, we’ll look at making it available for free shortly, so keep an eye out.
We didn’t include the name of every application in the report, but if there is a specific area you are interested in let me know and I will see what I can dig out. (bear in mind the data is a few months old)

- 11 November 2010 at 10:55 pm

Augmented Reality and Tomatoes: Competitive Analysis – Michelle « Design+Research said:

[...] Planet: http://www.augmentedplanet.com/2010/06/the-mobile-augmented-reality-competitive-landscape/ (This site has good diversity of information and links to other AR relevant [...]

- 11 April 2011 at 3:47 pm

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