Augment:ed Reality How to Do AR Right: Interview with Augment CEO
Secrets from Augment founder Jean-François Chianetta
Augment is a company that has been doing AR for a few years already, and they’re rapidly gaining traction. Their software enables architects to place buildings right near their lunch, and allows salespeople to place virtual coffee machines on the bar.
Jean is a passionate AR innovator and he tells us what has changed in the past five years since founding Augment, how to AR market is maturing, and why Google Project Tango is going to make AR/VR more functionally available on standard devices.
What did you find to be the most effective way of getting B2B customers interested in AR?
JC: Initially we tried to go to retailers and ecommerce websites. But in 2011–2012, it was still too early because they had no mobile apps, no responsive websites, nobody was buying from mobile devices, so the use case of Augment in that setting was not obvious. Then we just looked at what people were doing with our platform and we saw that there were a lot of salespeople and architects. And that’s why we pivoted to catering to salespeople and offering them a tool to be able to present their products from their devices in a customer meeting.
That’s where we knew we would get customers like Coca-Cola, and we saw that there was really a need when thousands of salespeople started being equipped with tablets and smartphone; the timing was really good for them.
What were some of your largest challenges as an AR centric company?
JC: The biggest challenge is that for the last 5 years the market was really nonexistent because nobody knew about AR. There was so much education needed in the market. Every time I showed AR to someone, it was the first time they saw it. And between the first time you see a technology and the time you adopt this technology in your company, it is not instantaneous. It’s not like you see something and you say “I’m going to use it.”
Now if you look at cloud storage, in every company there’s someone dedicated to cloud storage, and there are a lot of companies that offer those type of services. But 6–7 years ago nobody knew why they would need cloud storage. They were in a similar situation. At the beginning of Augment, we were there to educate the market. But since the rise of cloud storage and the market has exploded and cloud storage is everywhere, so Augments reality 5 years ago was at the same stage where nobody knew about it. Nobody knew how to use it and today it’s starting to shine. Suddenly we have a ton of companies that are reaching out to us, even people that have AR IT managers within their company. This is very new.
So recently you started gaining a lot of traction?
JC: Yeah, we’ve started to. We always had a lot of people using Augment but now we have real people with business cases. We’ve seen other companies using it for those kinds of business cases and we want to replicate that into their businesses. So it’s not just early adopters anymore. We really want to be innovative. It is real companies that see that there’s business potential and that it solves one of their problems. They want to implement the solution as a problem solving tool, which is not the same thing as just trying to look like you are in an innovative company.
What did you find to be the most effective way of getting companies to use it?
JC: Initially we tried to go to retailers and ecommerce websites. But in 2011–2012, it was still too early because they had no mobile apps, no responsive websites, nobody was buying from mobile devices, so the use case of Augment in that setting was not obvious. Then we just looked at what people were doing with our platform and we saw that there were a lot of salespeople and architects. And that’s why we pivoted to catering to salespeople and offering them a tool to be able to present their products from their devices in a customer meeting.
That’s where we knew we would get customers like Coca-Cola, and we saw that there was really a need when thousands of salespeople started being equipped with tablets and smartphone; the timing was really good for them.
“One third of our users are architects, construction companies and real estate companies”
I have a few friends in architecture using Augment. Do you see architecture as having a big part in your company’s future?
JC: Yeah, like one third of our users are architects, construction companies and real estate companies.
They just have to take their 3D models from whatever 3D software they use?
JC: And then put it on the platform, yeah. The only thing that may need to be done is simply for education of the model because when you have a free model of a building, the model can be really huge and you need to trim it down in order to get it in the platform.
So you are limited by the power of tablets and smartphones ability to render?
JC: Yeah, I mean architects they work with pretty powerful computers because those models are like 5GB in terms of size, so when you need to load that into memory it’s computers with 8, 16GB of memory and you never have that in the tablet. Some tablets, the full extent of the whole memory is 16GB so you can’t just open a large sized model.
Where did you have the most success in term of adoption and usage?
JC: In the CPG world. They consume good products like Coca-Cola and these kinds of companies will be working with 3D models so all the merchandise that you see everywhere, it’s built in 3D somewhere and they have thousands of resources and they have real needs in terms of showing their products to their customers. So imagine you’re Coca-Cola and you want to put a new fridge in the bar. It’s so much easier if you can talk to the bar and show what the fridge would look like as opposed to just talking to the bar owner [and explaining] that it will be this big or that it would look like this.
So that’s what we pinpoint. By now the majority [of salespeople] are already in possession of tablets, so it’s just perfect match for us. Their models are not too complicated and so that’s where we are in terms of commercial traction; that’s where we have the best traction. Then in terms of like user traction in architecture, the traction is really good and we have a lot of academics for universities, schools, colleges. More than 1,500 are registered to Augment and they use it in the classroom to show to students objects or a test, a chemistry molecule, a human body part and the students use it to present their project in a situation where the users are really engaged.
Do you think in the future you might transition to glasses once they become more popular?
JC: Yeah, I mean, I am sure the glasses are like the next stage in terms of AR so we’ll follow the flow of devices in order to have Augment available where it’s needed and right now it is tablets and smartphones, but in the future it can be glasses with headsets or any other type of device in which you can have an experience like this.
Very cool. What are you most excited about that’s coming up for Augment?
JC: I think the arrival of the depth sensing, like Google Tango in mass production smartphones and the Lenovo Phab 2 is the first smartphone that will have depth sensing and it arrives in September. That’s really exciting because, depth sensing, it changes everything in terms of user experience since that sensor allows the smartphone to have knowledge of this place so it knows where the floor is, where the walls are, and it can really place them precisely, at a scale where you want the model to be. So for me that’s very exciting. It will really change the perception of Augment reality because you won’t need to have a tracker to fiddle around with the model to place it correctly. It would be wider, right scale
And the Google project Tango, is that an addition to the Nexus phones?
JC: No, the Google Tango is their ability to have depth sensing and this is integrated in the Lenovo Phab 2 and it will be integrated in other smartphones in the future, so maybe in the early new Nexus or the new Samsungs. They haven’t announced anything, but it’s supposed to be that next sensor that will be deployed massively.
Do you have any advice for those looking to join the AR industry?
JC: I would say to be really knowledgeable about the industry itself. There is lots of information out there and if you come with full knowledge of what’s going on, what the technology is, how it works, if you already have ideas and how it can be used, it will be a lot easier to get an AR company than if you just come without any previous knowledge. Right now it’s easy to get a job in an AR company if you already know about AR because, really, no one knows about AR, so if you come and you already know a lot and you can show that knowledge to the company, you can get a job.
Very cool. Is there anything else you want to share with the readers?
JC: I would say just that I think Augment is the best way to discover with variety, you can download the app on your OS for free and give it a try, test it and visualize. Readers can do all that and see what it is and how it looks because you can ask people describe AR to you for hours, but you will never know how it really feels before you test it. So yeah, give it a try, test it and give us some feedback.
“You can ask people describe AR to you for hours, but you will never know how it really feels before you test it”
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