🔒Millennial entrepreneur Williams testing market for augmented reality

Benjamin Williams was sitting in the living room of his friend and former professor David Oyanadel’s house a few years ago when they came across a Youtube video of someone flipping through a dinosaur coloring book on a tablet computer.

After swiping through a few pages of the book, the hands put the tablet down, and a 3D computer-generated dinosaur seems to appear atop the screen. The 2015 video was the first example of augmented reality (AR) that caught Williams’ eye.

“I immediately said, ‘this is it,’ you know, this is the technology of the future,” said the 28-year-old UConn MBA graduate. “If people can learn by bringing stories to life through books, I mean, what else can we do with this?”

After watching the video, Williams and Oyanadel busied themselves learning the emerging technology of augmented reality, spending more than a year figuring out ways to harness AR so they could monetize it. In early 2017, Williams started a new company, ARsome Technology Group, with himself as chief executive and Oyanadel as chief innovation officer.

AR places imaginary objects into the real world, at least that’s how it seems for users. Think about the 2016 Pokemon Go game, in which users can look through their phone cameras and see game-generated eggs sitting next to real-world objects like signs and stairs.

ARsome’s first contract was to make an augmented-reality scavenger hunt for a Boston wax museum. Since then, ARsome has garnered clients in the education and retail fields — enough to self-fund a seven-person staff that includes game designers and software engineers.

The Manchester-based company, which wouldn’t disclose its annual revenues, is also involved in virtual reality and other technology platforms.

Competitors in the nascent industry have yet to find the kind of money-generating business model entrepreneurs thirst for when a new technology hits the consumer consciousness, according to Matt Szymczyk, chief executive of pioneering AR company Zugara, which has developed virtual dressing rooms and other technology.

But, as market watchers predict an uptick in AR spending this year and companies become more open to using it, ARsome is plugging along. Williams isn’t rushing to strike gold, but emanates a confidence that his company eventually will.

Reconnecting

Despite working to keep his company on the cutting edge of a new technology, Williams had little interest in tech growing up. Entrepreneurship, however, did ring his bell early. At 16, rather than put in applications for part-time jobs, Williams started an adhoc fitness business, earning about $1,000 per month training clients he found through family and friends.

“We would go to a football field or soccer field Saturday morning at 8 o’clock, and I would throw out some cones and some weights, and (train) for 45 minutes, and make $50,” Williams said.

That impulse followed him into college at Eastern Connecticut State University, where he studied business. It was there where he met Oyanadel, who taught a Saturday morning information-systems course Williams took during his senior year.

Williams was a star student in the class, Oyanadel recalls, but he figured the relationship would end when the course did.

“One day we reconnected, because [he was applying to the] UConn MBA program, and he asked for a recommendation, and we started to talk again,” said Oyanadel, who was coincidentally enrolling at UConn’s executive MBA program at the time. “We started to talk about different business connections that we had … and that’s how the conversation started about joining together.”

The two saw that AR dinosaur book on Youtube about a year later.

Since that first contract job for the wax museum, ARsome’s projects have been diverse, but largely in the educational arena. The company completed a project at the Hartford Public Library last year for which it made a Mark Twain statue come to life on viewers’ phones or tablets when they pointed them at the bronze figure.

In addition, the company is involved in non-AR-related tech projects. For example, it’s working on a teaching platform that includes a video-game component for an Australian company.

Williams also sees growth opportunities in retail, like allowing a watch buyer to virtually see how the product would look on his or her wrist.

Future growth

Augmented reality has not become mainstream yet so the industry is still searching for a more stable financial footing, said Szymczyk, the CEO of Los Angeles-based Zugara.

“Where we’re at now, there’s really still not a lot of money in AR,” Szymczyk said. “(AR) is still kind of falling into the experimental category for companies and brands.”

But Szymczyk and others in AR do see that changing in the future. Market intelligence firm International Data Corporation in December forecasted worldwide spending on AR and VR will reach $20.4 billion in 2019, nearly 70 percent more than last year.

For now, ARsome is hitting all its quarterly revenue goals and is eyeing more work in Boston, New York and the West Coast, Williams said.

“When I feel that momentum is lacking, then I’ll make a change,” Williams said. “But now I think we keep doing what we’re doing, and hopefully the sun stays in the sky.”