Japan’s ARappli Aims to Bring Augmented Reality to Everyone

Augmented reality (AR) and quick response codes (QR) are pretty neat technologies. But they aren’t often used because it is tough to execute a seamless AR campaign/experience, at least from the layman’s point of view. I met up with the folks from Arara Inc. who run ARappli. Arara is a very cool company that specifically helps brands and regular people, like you and me, to solve problems using AR and QR technologies.

Now, this isn’t another marketing firm that is using AR and QR for gimmicky purposes. One of the founders of AR and developer of AR toolkit, professor Hirokazu Kato, is actually actively involved with the R&D at ARappli.

In short, ARappli is an AR application that creates and reads rich content such as movies, 3DCGs, and animations from the cloud. It can be used for mobile marketing, personalized messaging, and visualization (say for home designers, for example). Let’s say I receive a card from a friend. Instead of just reading the text, I can scan the QR code and listen to a birthday song with dancing animation. Of course, ARappli also allows you to create personalized messaging with your own face in it.

What I liked about ARappli is that it doesn’t require the user to scan the code at a specific angle or distance. A user can scan a QR code from a distance and still see the correct image. That means, a user can scan a QR code from a billboard or a building even from far away. Making AR easier to use in this way should encourage more brands to adopt the technology.

Of course, ARappli isn’t the only company that is focusing on AR. But Ishiko Masayoshi and Chan Wei Siang claimed that ARappli is one of the few that focuses on both cloud-based and vision-based AR technologies.

The ARappli app has more than 500,000 downloads currently and is growing very quickly as more brands, such as Dior and Hallmark, are using its technology for promotions and greetings, respectively. That said, ARappli’s business model is sort of “viral” in its form. Whenever it promotes a product, users are prompted to download the ARappli app.

As its business in Japan continues to grow, the team is already looking at Singapore for further expansion. If you like what you have read so far, you can download the app here and scan some codes here to experience it yourself. Have fun!