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by sthielen 3023 days ago
I think the sentiment implicit in your question—that the initial hype wave of AR has cooled off—is valid. I believe one of the biggest reasons we’ve yet to see AR truly succeed on mobile is that it’s prohibitively difficult it is to create AR content right now. You need professional developers and real budgets to create a single AR experience. It’s too costly for businesses/brands/individuals to experiment or try new things, which is why there are only something like 2,000 ARKit apps on the Apple App Store [0]. Given that, it’s not surprising that we haven’t seen any big, behavior-changing hits aside from Pokemon Go and messenger frames.

You might be interested in what we've been working on at Metaverse [1]. The platform we're building allows non-programmers to create interactive content that leverages AR (our beta testers have already created over 30K experiences).

We’ve been at it for about a year and a half now and are still in beta, but it's being used by marketers, teachers, record labels, etc. [2] These people don’t know how to code (most of them don’t even know what ARKit is). They’re ordinary people [3] who now have access to a powerful tool that lets them try new things, play with new patterns, and leverage otherwise-inaccessible technologies to solve their own problems.

The long tail of Youtube brought us unboxing videos, Twitch, and Justin Bieber; we want to see what AR (and software, generally) begins to look like when ordinary people have the power to create. I think that's where the really cool stuff is going to be. Check out our Twitter account to see some of the awesome things people are making: https://twitter.com/metaverseapp

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[0] https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/02/this-is-tim-transcript-of...

[1] https://gometa.io/

[2] https://medium.com/metaverseapp

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-VTbkDX694

1 comments

FYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t1g5_eGkJI at the end points to gometa.io/gifts which is dead
Thanks for the heads up :) We leaned into a lot of location-based stuff in the early days (around the time of the Pokemon Go craze)--check these out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd6DjJ0GdBQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCrWYFTDqfU