The Growth and Unknown Potential for Augmented Reality

While Metaio hosted an Augmented Reality conference in Munich, Germany last week, the field is clearly continuing to grow in popularity, yet the potential remains somewhat mysterious and unknown at this time. Well, that's my opinion anyway. As more companies pop up with unique business models and fascinating, innovative, futuristic-movie-style ideas for the Augmented Reality (AR) industry, it's exciting yet tough for me to understand which areas of AR will hit the big-time and generate serious revenue and profits. I hope the market does not offer financial investment, accolades, and undue praise for "cool" and innovative AR business models that are not focused on generating true financial returns. As we all witnessed during the Internet boom of the late 1990's, many futuristic Internet companies raised significant cash and went public at insanely-inflated valuations because the market hype supported it. As the majority of those firms went bust and people lost millions (billions?) of dollars, a handful have survived and prospered over the past 8-12 years. Some of those that have survived actually had business models in the 1990's that yes, did in fact, focus on revenues and profits. And whether these new AR firms are started by college-age brainiacs or dropouts, or graduates of top business schools (like Columbia!), I hope they all have the good sense to draft their business plans with the same basic themes of growth, revenue model, competitive advantage (Greenwald!), scalability, and returns on investment.

Because without these essential elements, any business is doomed to fail, unless of course fantasy (or heavy risk-absorbable) investors continue to pour the $$ into the firms with hopes that one day, somehow, some way, there will actually be revenue and profits. Anxious to see how amazing Augmented Reality truly is, and who can creatively tap the potential (profitably, of course).