Who will be the Pixar of AR? Someone oughta be rounding up Hollywood special effects engineers and animated character designers to build an augmented reality content startup.
This week’s launch of Facebook’s Camera Effects platform means there are suddenly 1.8 billion people waiting to be entertained by digital overlays on the real world. And now, startups won’t have to grow a user base from scratch, make people recreate their social graph, establish a place to share the content they capture or develop much of the underlying object recognition and spatial perception technology.
All they have to do is build things that amuse people with the magic of visualized imagination. Facebook is desperate to prove there are killer AR experiences out there, so there’s plenty of opportunity to be featured on the platform. Whoever establishes themselves as capable of commanding people’s attention with this new medium will have businesses throwing money at them to build branded AR experiences — like how BuzzFeed monetizes through its BuzzFeed Motion Pictures ad creative team.
And since everything that happens in Facebook AR happens “on camera,” it’s instantly shareable with a massive social network. AR will become part of the new social media storytelling vocabulary, offering viral growth for developers.
Experts in the field tell me there are no standout AR content startups. That seems like a lucrative gap to fill. There are already a bunch of startups like Penrose, Baobab and Within vying to be the Pixar of VR. Several have raised tens of millions of dollars. And that’s despite the fact that most people don’t own a VR headset, and, if they do, it’s probably gathering dust somewhere.
The main point Mark Zuckerberg tried to get across in his Facebook F8 conference keynote was that we don’t need to wait for augmented reality glasses. There’s already an AR device with near ubiquitous market penetration: the smartphone camera. Yet because the physical world is so big, blanketing it in AR experiences may necessitate leaning on an army of outside developers — whom Facebook has historically embraced, but Snapchat has shunned.
When any new communication medium hits massive audience scale, there’s a chance for new players to break into the entertainment space. It happened with radio, film, TV, web video, mobile apps and VR. Pixar saw computer-rendered animation’s promise, seized on it early and grew into a hugely successful business.
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Source: TechCrunch