In 2011, mobile Augmented Reality continued to mature and major new players entered (e.g., Autonomy with Aurasma, Nokia with Live View). Several important deals with handset manufacturers (e.g., Wikitude with RIM and Huawei, metaio with Texas Instruments and other chip houses) indicate that more users will have the AR capability pre-loaded in their 2012 devices, but it was also a tough year for the segment's "legacy players," if we can use this label.
For example, some of the leading developers in 2009 (e.g., Acrossair, Hoppala) morphed and grew very quiet. On the technology provider side, there have been a few important developments (that failed to make headlines) in the last months of the year: Layar quietly shared to its developer ecosystem that it was changing direction and there were significant lay-offs in late November; in October, Total Immersion released its latest D'Fusion Studio at no cost for non-commercial use (presumably if the platform was selling well and lots of new developers were signing up, they would not have needed to release the no cost program). Two of the other leading AR developer tool providers are comparatively quiet as well: Wikitude's new platform ARchitect Developer Kit is (as of mid-December) still in Beta; AR Toolworks has not announced any new features to its commercial product line in ten months.
What will 2012 bring? My predictions for the year ahead include:
1. metaio undergoes a dramatic change in company management or structure through either merger with another technology provider or acquisition.
2. Increased fragmentation of market (more difficulty achieving a critical mass of loyal users on one system or platform) due to several significant new platforms for AR being introduced in 2012 and few companies publishing open APIs to bridge between the technology silos.
3. Social AR capabilities (self publishing features or connections to social networks) advance significantly compared with the state of the art on the last day of 2011.
Let's see in the coming weeks what others predict and, at the end of 2012, compare these with the developments of the year.
December 13, 2011 update: Remco Vroom and Johannes La Poutre over at TAB World Media seem to like the idea that 2012 will be the year of point-to-know. More about this as a consumer trend on TrendWatching for 2012.
December 30, 2011 update: I watched a 1-minute animated slideshow containing no details on the predictions of Kiran Voleti
January 3, 2012 update: Brian Wassom has posted his five predictions for AR and the law in 2012. I've written a new post about my reactions to his predictions.
January 9, 2012 update: Catchfire Media Predicts that AR will go mainstream in 2012!
I'll append the predictions of other industry watchers to this post when I learn of them.