8th Wall, an Augmented Reality (AR) company, announced a complete authoring platform on cloud set to enhance the consumer’s AR experience. The company also raised $10 million last year. Its CEO Erik Murphy-Chutorian candidly admitted more interest and action toward developing swift and lightweight projects rendered to scale exponentially.

The 8th Wall team is currently focused on WebAR, which allows mobile phone users to call up web experiences inside the browser. WebAR has a better appeal for mobile phone users because it lets them access the program using a link rather than downloading or accessing it through an app. It sits well with businesses looking to explore AR as a channel for branded marketing interactions.

8th Wall’s initial offering was an AR platform, similar to ARCore and ARKit, which let developers build content supporting both Android and iOS smartphones.

To ease the AR launch process for organizations and freelancers, 8th Wall has launched the platform, an end-to-end cloud solution to create, collaborate, and publish browser-based WebAR projects instantly. The cloud solution for WebAR will offer templates, the ability to collaborate, and built-in hosting to cater to the developers to bring large-scale AR experiences to the market. The company was founded in 2016 by Erik Murphy-Chutorian with a mission to make AR content accessible to all.

8th Wall has brand names as customers to its credit. It has provided AR solutions to Sony Pictures Spider-Man, Miller Lite, British Gas, Heineken, Porsche, Red Bull, Time Magazine, Lego, and Ally Monopoly.

AR Insider estimates that WebAR can tap nearly twice as many smartphones as native AR apps, with the current mobile devices market touching 2.97 billion compatible devices. As per IDC, the VR/AR market reached $ 16.8 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach $ 160 billion by 2023.

According to Mobidev, AR paired with smartphones and smart glasses is set to cross a revenue figure of $ 70–75 billion. According to the 8th Wall data, 50% of the users are currently spending more than 2 minutes interacting within a single WebAR activation.

AR developers today are looking toward technology, beyond the clunky headsets and headphones, that is, smartphones as an option to reach a wider audience. Smartphones offer the required technical capabilities. Therefore the developers have their task cut-out to implement a solution that can function intuitively, bringing an immersive experience to the consumers at the same time.

With major mobile makers such as Apple and Samsung already offering tools to bring the AR experience on the phone, it will be interesting to see how developers redefine AR to make branded content.