Update: Amazon just released Lumberyard, a free AAA game engine deeply integrated with AWS & Twitch.

What’s next? Mobile is entering its comforting middle age period of development. Conversational commerce is a thing, a good thing, but is it really a great thing?

What’s next may be what has been next for decades: Augmented reality (AR) (and VR). AR systems will be here sooner than you might think. A matter of years, not decades. Robert Scoble, for example, thinks Meta, an early startup in AR industry, will be bigger than the Macintosh. More on that in a later post. Magic Leap has no product and $1.3 billion in funding. Facebook has Oculus. Microsoft has HoloLens. Google may be releasing a VR system later this year. Apple is working on VR. Becoming the next iPhone is up for grabs.

AR is a Huge Opportunity for Programmers and Startups 

This is a technological revolution that will be bigger than mobile. Opportunities in mobile for developers have largely played out. Experience shows the earlier you get in on a revolution the better the opportunity will be. Do you want to be writing free iOS apps forever?

It’s so early we don’t really have an idea what AR is or what the market will be or what it means from a developer perspective. But if you watched the Super Bowl you saw an early example of the power of AR. It’s the benign looking, yet technically impressive, computer generated yellow first down line marker.

Augmented Reality is Already a Sports Reality