In October 15, 2019 – 8th Wall has today announced that Tom Emrich will be joining the company as VP of Product. Emrich will be working with Founder and CEO Erik Murphy-Chutorian, as well as the rest of the 8th Wall team on the company’s shared mission to ensure that anyone and everyone can experience augmented reality, no matter what device they are on.
Emrich has worked in AR for over a decade, mostly as a champion to usher the technology in. In a blog post announcing his appointment, Emrich said: “I believe we are in a critical stage of AR’s journey to become the next wave of computing. The time has come for AR to move from a technology to a solution and to do this we need to empower two essential groups: developers and users. Developers need intuitive tools to create high quality, meaningful and value-centric AR experiences and solutions that are capable of earning revenue and achieving scale. Users need to be able to access these experiences and solutions quickly, easily and with as little friction as possible with whatever device they currently have in their hands (or heads).” He added, “8th Wall is making this happen.”
The 8th Wall platform is used by developers to build immersive AR experiences that work on every mobile device in a mobile browser without the installation of a standalone app required. Standalone native applications can also be created through the 8th Wall platform, as it also provides native libraries that integrate with ARKit and ARCore to power mobile applications that can run across commonly used Android and iPhone devices.
The company has recently celebrated its one year anniversary of the 8th Wall Web platform, which it states has over 10,000 developer accounts and has been used to create over 5,000 WebAR apps for brands such as adidas, Lego, Toyota, Microsoft, Sony Pictures and TIME.
8th Wall states that 80% of end users spend more than 1 full minute within each published WebAR experience. Furthermore, according to its data, 50% of users spend greater than 2 minutes interacting within a single WebAR activation. With the global market of WebAR-compatible devices estimated at over 2.98 billion, compared to 1.11 billion ARKit- and 550 million ARCore-compatible devices (according to ARtillery), WebAR has the ability to reach nearly twice as many smartphones as native AR apps.
Emrich commented further: “I cannot underscore enough the critical role 8th Wall is playing in the success of augmented reality today. I am beyond excited to join an incredible team in their efforts to support the AR developer community in delivering quality AR experiences to the market.”
Image credit: Forbes/8th Wall
Related Posts
About the author
Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.