Announcing the 2009 Winners!

The first annual Augmented Planet Readers Choice awards are over and congratulations to all of the nominees and the winners. We asked you, the reader, to vote for your favourite example of augmented reality in 2009. The winners and runners up for each category are:

Best augmented reality mobile browser

• Winner - Mobilizy (www.mobilizy.com) and the Wikitude World Browser, available for the Android and the iPhone.
• Runner up – Layar (www.layar.com)

Best augmented reality mobile application

• Winner - Acrossair (www.acrossair.com) and their public transportation location applications (NY Subway, Nearest Tube, Barcelona Metro, Chicago Transit, SF Transit, Madrid Metro, Washington Metro, Paris Metro, Tokyo Subway), for the iPhone.
• Runner up – Yelp (www.yelp.com)

Best web based augmented reality demo

• Winner – Total Immersion (www.t-immersion.com) / PPC (www.theppc.com) and the “We Are AutoBots” demo created for the Transformers movie (www.weareautobots.com/uk/index.php)
• Runner up – James Alliban and his Augmented Reality Business Card (blog.skive.co.uk/index.php/2009/07/20/ironic-business-card-becomes-accidental-viral)

What we learned

Our survey results also show that most users have experienced augmented reality through a mobile device such as the Apple iPhone or Android with 94% of all respondents having used a location aware augmented reality browser for local search or viewing nearby points of interest. Augmented reality usage on mobile devices is not limited to just location aware browsers with 63% of respondents having used other augmented reality applications such as car locators or nearest tube (subway) Finders.

On the web, 58% of users who answered the survey have tried an online web based augmented reality demo using their web browser and webcam.
In the category of augmented reality browsers, as expected; Wikitude and Layar are the most dominant browsers accounting for 74% of the votes between them.

Since the market for augmented reality applications has grown significantly this year we expected this category to be fiercely contested without a runaway winner; however the public transport applications from Acrossair emerged as the clear winner with margin of 20% greater than the runner up spot.

Of all the survey respondents, 37% said they have never tried an application outside of an augmented reality browser.

This year we have seen Hollywood embrace augmented reality with several movie based online browser/webcam demos. The competition for this category was tough with voting being spread move evenly than the other categories.

42% of the survey respondents have yet to enjoy an online augmented reality demo (take a look in our resources directory for demos you can try www.augmentedplanet.com/resources/)

Thanks
A big thanks to the developers of these apps, keep up the great work. Secondly thank you to everyone that voted.

I look forward to your participation and more so, the results of the 2010 Readers Choice Awards!

Lester.