Augmented reality startup Blippar hopes to turn your face into a digital billboard
The latest product from augmented reality startup
Blippar has a simple, if somewhat unnerving, pitch: what if you could
turn your face into a digital billboard?
The company’s new Halos feature allows you to do exactly
that. You scan your likeness with the Blippar app and it saves a version
of you on its servers. You can then fill out some personal tidbits,
like your favorite music or latest tweets, and anyone who “blipps” you
in future (i.e., scans your face with the app) will see this information
as a halo of bubbles floating around your head.
“[It’s] your unique way to express yourself,” Blippar CEO Ambarish Mitra tells The Verge.
“Your face is like your billboard — we recognize human beings by their
faces — and this is like a digital manifestation of that.”
Conceptually, it’s a bit weird, but the facial
recognition part is quick and accurate, and for Blippar that’s what
matters most. The company says it’s pitching the app to consumers, but
also wants it to act as advertising for its technology (a billboard, if
you will) that it hopes to sell to third parties. Mitra suggests the
tech could be incorporated by banks for authentication purposes, or by
apps for conferences and events, with attendees able to scan each
other’s faces to find out who they are and what they do.
Anyone can sign up for Halos now, but the feature actually launched last year
for celebrities only. Since then, though, a number of reports have
suggested that the UK startup is struggling to makes its business work.
A blip in the finances
The company started life as what was essentially a
marketing agency, partnering with big clients like Coca-Cola and Cadbury
to add AR features to their advertising. (You’d scan an ad with the
Blippar app to see some extra content or a special offer.) But according
to a report from Business Insider,
the company didn’t get enough repeat business to sustain this model.
It’s since pivoted to developing its own AR and object recognition, and
selling these features to other firms.
But this approach might not be working either. In its most recent financial accounts,
Blippar posted a loss of £25.8 million ($31.3 million) in the 16 months
leading up to March 2016, while revenues over that same time period
were £8.5 million. Reports from Bloomberg and Business Insider
said the company is burning through cash fast, and needs another
funding round to stay soluble. (The company’s CEO was also caught in a
minor scandal when the Financial Times found he’d been embellishing his CV.)
When asked about these problems, Mitra was upbeat. “No,
we are not in the middle of a funding round, in fact we have several
product launches coming up,” he told The Verge. “Blippar is in a very healthy financial condition.” He also dismissed reports interpreting the closure of the company’s San Francisco offices
as a sign of trouble: “We actually moved into a bigger offices with
bigger head count. We shut down our San Francisco offices with a
2,200-square-foot office, and moved to a 10,000-square-foot office in
Mountain View, which is way more expensive real estate.”
Mitra did acknowledge that the company was currently
spending a lot, but explained it as a natural result of the company’s
pivot to tech R&D. “The burn is a natural factor,” he said. “You
cannot hire the world’s smartest people and not expect burn, and AI,
particularly, is an industry where talent costs [...] But this is
something we’re welcoming. We’re not worried by it, we’re excited by
it.”
Building the AR Wikipedia
And Blippar’s end goal is pretty exciting. Eventually,
says Mitra, he wants the company to build a complete “visual browser” —
an app that recognizes and identifies anything you point your
phone at. Scan a car, for example, and it’ll identify the manufacturer,
make, and year, and then maybe bring up the Wikipedia page and tell you
how much one costs to buy. In fact, Blippar’s app already does this in the US, but Mitra wants it to cover more, from animals to products to people. Thus the new facial recognition feature.
At its best, Blippar could be an AR Wikipedia, the
ultimate tool to satisfy your curiosity. At the moment, when I point it
at my kitchen, it just tells me where the nearest Muji store is.
Meanwhile, rivals are diving into the same space, offering their own
augmented reality products. There’s Shazam for food, Samsung’s “Bixby Vision” on the new Galaxy, and Apple’s ARKit. If Blippar wants to build the ultimate visual search engine, it needs to get a move on. Via theVerge
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