The Shazam-ifying of Everything
I’m a fan of Augmented Reality (AR) because it has the potential to bridge the real-world and the virtual world. One of the big problems that needs to be solved before AR is ready for everyday use is to develop technology that enables computers to better understand the real world. This understanding of the surrounding environment will allow an AR device to provide helpful real-time information about what a user is looking at.
TL;DR
Several Shazam-like companies have begun to emerge that can identify different types of content visually such as buildings and wine bottles. These companies solve hard computer vision problems that enable new AR applications. These utility applications will be core to creating the magical experiences which will help drive consumer adoption of AR.
A company that has cracked this problem for a specific type of content is Shazam. Shazam is a popular mobile application that is able to recognize songs and other audio clips using sophisticated audio-fingerprinting techniques. A common use case is when hearing a song on the radio or at a bar and you hold up your phone with Shazam running. The phone “listens” and then is able to figure out what the song is. The first time you use Shazam it’s like magic. Anyone that struggled to figure out what a song was that they heard on a radio was blown away by how easy it was to use the product and how well it worked.
An AR device would need to have a Shazam for everything to digitally understand the world around us so that the information it presents on-top of the real world is more useful.
For example, a Shazam for vehicles system that’s able to identify types of cars using their shape and design features could tell you the make and model of a car when you look at it. It could even use that information to lookup the price of a car and display it over a car as you look at it.
Presence Capital portfolio company Waygo builds software that lets computers identify Japanese characters. This Shazam for Japanese writing allows an AR system to do things like display the definition of the characters, translate the characters into English, or even help Japanese students learn the pronunciation of those characters.
Another one of our portfolio companies, Fringefy, is able to identify buildings based on their shape and façade. This Shazam for buildings could be used to display the name of a restaurant and it’s reviews, the price of a home, or if there are any units available in an apartment building.
This same pattern could be applied to wine (The company Delectable already does this), furniture, art, mechanical parts, pills, animals, plants, and pretty much anything else you interact with in the real world.
All of these applications have a similar theme. They take something inherently visually complicated, reduce it down to a simple fingerprint, and then quickly check that fingerprint against a comprehensive database to determine what it is. By being able to do this quickly, they allow computers to give us more just-in-time information about the real world seamlessly.
Due to the difficulty in developing a good Shazam-like fingerprinting algorithm and then populating a database to check fingerprints against, there is an opportunity for startups to have an monopoly on solving this problem. Since each type of content being identified is a unique computer vision challenge and requires a specialized algorithm to work accurately, it’s likely that multiple companies will emerge to tackle different verticals.
It’s also feasible to think that the creators of the main AR devices (e.g. Magic Leap, Microsoft, and Google) will want to incorporate this technology into their core OS experience because it adds a large amount of everyday utility to their devices. This approach is similar to how the first versions of iOS incorporated 3rd party data applications like Google Maps and Yahoo Weather. So either through large licensing deals or by acquisition, companies building this Shazam-like technology will create a lot of value for the AR ecosystem.
If you’re working on one of these types of businesses, we’d love to talk to you.
