We are the future of search browsers: Blippar live on Wall Street Journal

‘The jury is out about whether Google can make wearable technology work on their Glass. However, one company in the augmented reality field is confident it can harness wearable technology to pioneer the next generation of search engines.'

This was journalist Simon Constable’s introduction to our CEO Rish Mitra when they met in the Wall Street Journal studios for a live video interview about the future of AR and wearable tech.

And Rish certainly made his confidence felt.

Speaking about what’s been happening Blippar HQ since his last appearance on the news channel, Rish mentioned the most recent plot twist in the Blippar story.

He said: ‘We’ve just acquired Layar, another lens business. It was one of the largest consumer augmented reality companies in the world and they were a competitor, so Blippar acquiring them now makes us the biggest consumer augmented reality platform in the world, with over 50m users.

‘It’s important because consumer augmented reality is in its initial traction – but now we’ve become a bigger powerhouse. And 50 million is a large number.’

Asked to explain what augmented reality really is - simply, and to people who still don’t really get it – Rish broke the concept down into digestible chunks: ‘AR means computer-generated information on top of the real world, which can be used to enhance reality, give additional information or give entertainment when seen through the lens of a computer.’

And when Simon tried to ruffle his feathers by saying that sometimes it was nice to look at the world through just your eyes instead of through a screen, Rish remained utterly unruffled.

‘When you go through your day-to-day life looking around, I think people will continue to do that and human behaviour will not change.

‘What this behaviour is about is the things you normally search for in a search engine and try to describe with key words; now you will just be able to look at them and get the associated information.’

The presenter agreed that ‘sometimes what I’m trying to search for doesn’t match up with what I get’, to which Rish simply smiled knowingly, and replied: ‘Your search results are as good as your perception of the world. Which can be sometimes wrong.’