This past week (Oct 19-22, 2009) in Orlando, FL there was the International Symposium on Mixed Augmented Reality (ISMAR) Conference. I was not able to attend but followed the blogs, and twitter accounts of those that attended. An awesome summary post was written by Joe Ludwig from his Programmer Joe blog on 50 Things I learned at ISMAR 2009.

A lot of things were personal to him, but there were a few observations that I thought were critical in understanding the current state of AR within the “technical” crowd versus how AR will emerge within the general integrated digital marketing in the coming months.

Here are some the Top 10 excerpts from his observations that I want to highlight:

1. The academic AR community is ready to welcome industry to their conference with open arms. Apparently there were many more companies present this year than last year.
2. I believe that augmented reality is the next big technology revolution and will have an impact at least as big as the web’s impact. This will provide opportunities for tons of companies and as a result there’s no reason to start competing bitterly at this early stage.
3. There are more AR startups out there that are flying under the radar.
4. Silicon Valley remains completely oblivious to AR. If Robert and I are right it will be interesting to see what this means for their dominance of the startup community.
5. Qualcomm is backing AR in a big way and intends to be the hardware provider of choice for mobile AR.
6. It is far too early for meaningful standards in AR. It would be awfully nice if the Wikitude content provider API used the same format that people are already providing to Layar, however.
7. Peter from Metaio suggests that if you want to get anything done in the AR space you shouldn’t spend any time worrying about whether or not what you’re doing is AR or not. I agree with him. There’s not a clear line between AR and not AR and there probably never will be.
8. For many researchers, augmented reality is a solution looking for a problem. There are a lot of gee-whiz demos and many people seem to accept cool factor as a compelling reason to use AR instead of more traditional solutions.
9. By and large academics feel that augmented reality is poised to take off in a big way.
10. Nobody in the ISMAR community takes the various advertising uses of AR too seriously.

I wanted to highlight the last one because that was the key factor for me writing this summary of the top 10 ISMAR 2009 moments. The desert seems ripe for an oasis for marketers and agencies to be the first ones to master AR as in integrated marketing channel. Who will step up to the challenge?