Aurasma (HP Reveal)

» see aurasma.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

aurasma launched 5 may 2011 out of autonomy's cambridge office, the same autonomy mike lynch was about to sell to hp for eleven billion dollars later that year. the product was a free mobile app that did marker-based augmented reality. you printed a small image, called a trigger, and the aurasma app would recognize it through the camera and play back a video or 3D model anchored on top. for a few years between 2012 and 2016 this was the canonical demo of consumer ar.

museums printed aurasma triggers on their placards while textbook publishers printed them inside science chapters. marketing agencies got there next, sticking them on cereal boxes and movie posters. teachers built treasure hunts where kids walked around a classroom holding tablets and got short videos popping up over taped-up paper squares. the platform never had to be very good at recognition because the markers were designed to be recognized.

museum-and-marketing ar was not my crowd. by 2013 i was an engineer in ankara working on actual computer vision stacks, opencv and tracking math, and aurasma sat on the consumer side as a closed demo with no developer access worth the trouble. i kept track of the platform the way you track competitors who are not really competitors, mostly through trade press.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

aurasma won the 2011 demogod award and the 2012 ar summit award for best ar app. financial times reviewed it in 2013 and called it ambitious but staggeringly useless, which captured both halves of the consumer experience. the technology demo was genuinely impressive the first time you saw it. the second use case never quite arrived. you pointed your phone at a marker and watched the marker do something, then put your phone down again with no obvious next step.

~ the slide ~

by 2015 google was shipping cardboard and apple was buying metaio for the ar technology that would become arkit. by 2017 arkit and arcore both shipped markerless ar that worked on any flat surface, which made the whole marker-based category feel quaint within a single os release cycle. hp rebranded aurasma to hp reveal in october 2017, around the time the company also divested autonomy to micro focus. the rebrand was the moment most people stopped opening the app.

~ what got buried with it ~

hp reveal shut down at the end of february 2020. the museum placards stayed up for years after, telling visitors to download an app that no longer existed in the stores. textbook publishers had to reprint the science chapters. the whole genre of marker-based consumer ar evaporated, replaced by phone os-level apis that nobody needed to download separately. aurasma's inheritance is on the back of every printed object from the mid-2010s that has a small mysterious image and no instructions on what to do with it.

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