The Open AR Cloud

Of the People, by the People, for the People…

Ray Di Carlo
Nov 5 · 4 min read

I came across this slide last week. It is from a presentation made on October 16th at The 2nd State of The AR Cloud Symposium and Showcase in Munich, Germany:

YOUAR‘s position on the slide timeline brought back fond memories. Waxing nostalgic, (2 years in augmented reality is a long time) I was reminded of how, the Open AR Cloud effort began.

YOUAR officially founded the AR Cloud Foundation in 2017 after spending many months working on an ARCF white paper (Including a proposed open market system that I will outline in future blogs).

That fall we spent an entire afternoon with Ori Inbar showing demos and discussing how an open system could work. Ori was inspired by our tech and vision to establish and gain traction for an open AR Cloud. He became our “biggest fan”. A week later, he wrote a wonderful medium article: “ARKit and ARCore will not usher massive adoption of mobile AR”.

I’ll never forget how much his article meant to me. My wife Jean and I were sitting at an outdoor café in Hood River when she read Ori’s Medium article. Afterwards she turned to me, referencing YOUAR as a whole, and said, “I thought you were working on a small little corner of AR. I didn’t realize the magnitude of your ambition. I am completely inspired and terrified.”

In the article, Ori laid out much of the vision we had discussed together and was kind enough to give us top billing in his list of AR Cloud companies.

Startups currently tackling the AR Cloud or parts of it: YOUar (Portland)…” — Ori Inbar

Since then, many “AR Cloud” and “Internet Of Places” articles have followed. Internet Of Places is the term we have always used to describe the future of the AR-serviced internet to come. With ubiquitous AR, the internet will be all around you, thus the IOP.

We have always believed that the IOP should be freely accessible to all. Google and Apple’s siloed efforts would instead lead to an AR-internet with controlled access points — analogous to the nineties when you had to use AOL or CompuServe to access the internet of the past.

At YOUAR, we saw the future of AR and the IOP as an open marketplace. We also knew that it would take a collaborative effort to create a global, open AR Cloud. Towards that end, Ori was instrumental; Among his many efforts, he introduced us to Jan-Erik Vinje, who serves as the Managing Director of the Open AR Cloud Association and later joined the board with us himself.

“We want to do this work open source and would love to collaborate with a worldwide community that is interested in the development of an Open AR Cloud”, said Jan-Erik at the time. “Several companies do interesting stuff that could point towards what I have in mind but I cannot find anything specifically stating an effort to create an Open AR Cloud.

We found a lot of synergy with Jan-Erik. He is an amazing promoter and a tireless believer in open access and open standards. We showed him our AR Cloud Foundation website, shared thoughts and tech.

YOUAR‘s 2017 AR Cloud Foundation website promoting a non-siloed AR Cloud with open standards:

Jan-Erik was very happy to find that we had real tech and had already made substantial AR Cloud efforts. We quickly decided to join forces in the pursuit of openness.

On Oct 18, 2018, with the help of Jan-Erik, David Daniels, Colin Steinmann, David Lorenzini, and of course Ori Inbar, the Open AR Cloud Association was founded.

Thinking back, I believe that our collective instincts for openness were right. From today’s perspective, it is doubly important that we stay active and diligent in our support for an Open Augmented Reality substructure.


I encourage everyone to become a member of the OARC. Join us and volunteer for one or more of the active working groups below.

Find more information on current working groups at Open AR Cloud

For early access to YOUAR’s Cloud SDK and to start building the AR Cloud now, visit youar.io.

Ray Di Carlo

Written by

YOUAR

YOUAR

YOUAR Augmented Reality Tools

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