Alex Young and Rob Manson developed a mobile payment platform for merchants in 2007. As Young says, “We were probably about five or six years early, given that this year is the year of mobile payments.” The pair moved on from the project and find themselves again at the forefront of innovation, with their current venture, Mob-Labs. The a key part of the business is focused on exploring applications and technical possibilities for augmented reality. Mob-labs was thus named to reflect the research and development skew of the business (50% – 60% of their time investment) and the acronym of the full business name, Mobile Online Business.

“Primarily we’re working on a platform called buildAR.com,” explains Young. “We really started work on that a few years back. We saw that there were many streams coming in the future and didn’t know what they were going to look like. We found that there was nothing out there that let you elegantly and efficiently develop from the ground up for lots of different types of devices. So we built what we call our smartmob platform. On top of that, or as an extension to that, we’ve now built buildAR as a stand-alone product, which really is like the world’s first content management system to create and manage augmented reality.

“Augmented reality (AR) is basically the ability to overlay digital experiences and content on the real world. There are different types of augmented reality. The two most common are marker-based, which uses kind of fiduciary markers, which almost look like QR codes and if you hold them up in front of the camera they’ve been encoded to trigger something to happen, and that might be a 3D object or an animation. There are also locative based ARs which tend to be more mobile-specific, so you hold up your mobile phone and you can, based on where you are, see things overlayed on the real environment. Basically, it pulls in your camera stream, so it looks like you’re looking through the phone and then overlays objects and you can interact with those objects. Now what’s really coming to the fore is computer vision, where you don’t have to have a marker that looks like a marker anymore, it can just be an object or an image you hold your phone up to and that recognises the image and triggers something, that be an animation a video, or a piece of content to be displayed.”

Augmented reality has been most popular to date in providing marketing solutions, but potential to use the technology in providing solutions in education and interpretation at cultural venues is huge. Not to mention the applications which are yet to be devised. “We say that AR is at the silent movie phase,” says Young, “It’s very much in its infancy and people are trying to understand what it can be used for. I think in the last 12 – 18 months, a lot of people have used it for marketing and novelty-based type things, so we haven’t seen a lot of use from a utility perspective, but I think that’s the golden egg, really, is to find utility for this type of thing. I think over time, as more embedded sensors get integrated into the environment you’ll see AR being around us, but you won’t necessarily think that it’s augmented reality, it’s will just be that bits of our environment just happen to have additional information available about them. It might even be things like you’re looking at a building and you can see how much energy that building uses and who is on each floor of that building.” says Young.

Mob-labs at one stage hired business development professionals to assist with nurturing the business, but found that the process of R&D didn’t lend itself to the model. In recent times, clients have contacted Mob-labs after seeing their work. Clients include Sculpture by the Sea, TEDxSydney and vivid live at the Sydney Opera House. The Mob-labs crew share news of work through their personal twitter accounts, and this has delivered clients. ”We take the view that with our personal accounts, you get the whole of us, you don’t just get the business stuff, so it’s worked quite well. Probably had about 40% of our client business last year was from people contacting us via twitter after seeing what we do,” says Young. Mob-labs is currently researching navigation and journey tracking inside buildings, where GPS has notoriously been unsuccessful. For all you supermarkets, galleries and IKEAs, her twitter handle is @alexmyoung.