For those of you tracking the Augmented Reality (AR) space, I thought that this might interest you. Today our CEO (well my CEO, not yours), Matt Szymczyk, gave a presentation on AR at the IAB conference in Poland and demoed (for the first time) a new piece of technology that we’ve built called ZugSTAR.
ZugSTAR (Zugara Streaming Augmented Reality) allows for multiple people to share an AR experience via their video stream. In essence it’s a live video conference where you can see the data (or the image) that the other person is interacting with. The rest of the web is social, and now AR is too. It’s no longer a solitary experience.
This tech has potential for numerous verticals, but for the purpose of the demo, we’ve coupled it with our existing online AR shopping application, The Webcam Social Shopper. As you can see in the picture below (via @deandonaldson), Matt is onstage in Warsaw giving the presentation. Behind him (on the large screen, which is just a duplicate of what Matt is seeing on his laptop’s screen), my colleague Aaron is in his home in Los Angeles (at 3 in the a.m. local time mind you, so props for that) “modeling” a shirt. If you look at the bottom right corner of the video area in which Aaron is standing, you’ll notice the picture in picture, where you can see Matt with the image of the shirt he was “modeling” still up. AR is now two way, and it’s social.
Think about the opportunity that this presents for just the online retail space alone. Moms can shop with daughters away at college; Grandparents can shop with grandkids in another state; teenage girls can shop together on a weeknight; men can get articles of clothing “approved” by their girlfriends/wives while on their lunch break… etc. etc.
Admittedly, this blog post is just going to serve as a bit of a teaser. In a few weeks, we’ll have more details and more to show you then just a picture, but we’d love to know your initial thoughts on the tech below.
