What is WebAR?

 The Past I come from a humble background - I'm not a flashy tech CEO - nor do I really want to be. Hell, just recently I shelved that title and went for the moniker of CVO - Chief Visionary Officer, as really, that's more me. I've always seen things where they fit together best and how to make them more efficient. In 2011 I came across Augmented Reality - and I had an epiphany. Some have heard this story in pieces - this is the first time I have distilled it down to the essence of my journey - there was heartache along the way, bad decisions, but, honestly, who doesn't have those stories? I'm proud to be part of the club of learning life lessons. You see - I always dabbled in code, small projects, websites, and owned a print/media company from the age of 22 or so until I was 34. I was always buying the latest gear - digital press, large format printers, getting into CNC - with the goal of providing big value services at affordable rates as I templated almost everything. For example - my printshop was a blend of Fast Food menu meets Tattoo shop. Pick your size, template design, material, and so on - it was fast and efficient. At one point I was bringing in 6 figures a month with a small # of employees. Pretty good for my area and age. Some things happened as they do and I needed a change. I had knowledge of 3D models, video, graphic design, coding, print, and a few other things as most creative entrepreneurs seem to develop skillsets from necessity... so I decided to merge all my skills and go full tilt in AR - and have been in it for a decade now. It started with a company called Augmented Marketing - where my goal was to be a guru of software stacks - of which there were a few without going into names - and either consult or build to suit for clients. Pricing was scattered, SDK's were buggy, some only worked for iOS, some Android, some both... a few for Windows Phones (yeap) and eventually Blackberry allowed sideloading of android apps, which appeased brokers... for some reason... if the app was not available for most real estate agents/brokers...they didn't want to buy in, regardless of the fact that their reach was most likely using Android/iOS - but hey - that was selling apps... and Augmented Reality ones at that. I quickly found that it just didn't scale in terms of compiling/submitting/merging SDK's for different features/etc - then I found Metaio. It was like almost everything I could want at the time. I loved it so much that by the beginning of 2015, I was one of the top 2-3 (as we bounced back and forth) contributors to the forum/helpdesk (I was kind of addicted to the point system, admittedly). I was giving away ideas, code snippets, tutorials, whatever I could to be perceived as an expert. I soon became a software evangelist and did a few webinars to teach agencies and brands best practices for AR leveraging the Metaio Stack... I became a preferred Developer where I was being passed client work that they were doing and became a 3D store partner with them with another partnership I forged from a talented 3D Animator/Designer in Australia. We created a collection of AR 3D clipART that was built to work already optimized for the Metaio SDK - it was an e-comm store with affordable accent pieces from seasonal to call to action buttons (3D was really scattered at that time - still is - so this was VERY much needed. Thankfully fast forward to now and our awesome WorldCAST partner , Sketchfab, has a lot of that figured out, thankfully). Enter Mid-May 2015 - This is where it all goes to hell! (For me and countless others) Apple buys Metaio and shuts it all down. I found out when I landed in San Francisco as I had traveled there to give a Keynote at InsideAR on the democratization of AR .