Building a Startup in the Augmented Reality Space

Welcome to the Reality Studies podcast! This podcast tries to clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos. Each episode, I sit down with leading thinkers for big idea dialogues about the research, concepts, and questions that animate their approaches to reality.

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Today I am chatting with Asad J. Malk, CEO of Jadu AR. Asad is an augmented reality trailblazer whose critically-acclaimed narrative storytelling projects Terminal 3 and A Jester’s Tale premiered at Tribeca and Sundance Film Festivals, positioning Asad as a visionary in the space before completing his undergraduate degree. He has directed next-generation AR experiences featuring icons like Serena Williams and Lil Nas X. Asad was named one of Variety’s 10 Innovators to Watch, Rolling Stone’s Future 25, Forbes’ 30 Under 30, and Adweek’s Young Influentials.

Ever since Minority Report and Iron Man in the aughts, augmented reality has been touted as being the next big thing just around the corner. But the reality of bringing the medium to the mainstream has proven much more difficult than expected. Looking at you, Google Glass.

True, Pokémon GO made a big splash, but that was 7 years ago. And their developer hasn’t been able to duplicate the success since—even partnered with major names like Harry Potter and the NBA. They flat-out canceled projects with Transformers and Marvel. I don’t mean this as a knock to Niantic—they’re doing important work in the development of the AR ecosystem. All I’m trying to say is that AR is hard. 

That’s obviously true on a technical level—think about the amount of computing power and bandwidth required to translate digital objects and information seamlessly, instantaneously, and believably into your physical space. Lots of folks are still plugging away at those problems, making AR faster, leaner, less likely to burn your face, etc. But in my mind, the bigger challenge to AR is a social one. AR is a whole new medium. It’s not just another platform or set of apps. When done well, it has the potential to become a new language, redefining our relationship to both digital and physical space. 

This is something that Asad has really understood since he started developing AR experiences in college in the mid-2010s. He has seemingly always had an intuition for what the innate potential of the medium is, alongside a willingness to pivot in totally new directions to learn from what participants, players, and the public at large want to experience in AR. The advantage startups have over major incumbents like Niantic, Apple, Google, and Meta is speed. Asad has made use of this advantage, steering Jadu through different expressions of AR: holograms for social media videos, web3 integrations, and now a fighting game. And that’s not even mentioning the original work he did as a director focusing on AR headsets, creating era-defining installations at film festivals. On paper it sounds like a weird trajectory, but having witnessed its evolution, I can say that it makes sense in the social context of the medium.

We recorded the following interview in Asad’s office right before the game launched, but Jadu is officially out now, and already cracked the top 50 on the entertainment chart on the App Store. This feels to me like an early confirmation that the public is still interested in AR. They just need an experience that works, where the fun is not that it’s a new shiny gadget but rather in that it’s just fun on its own terms and offers something unique.

My thesis, which I’ve developed in part by observing the work of Asad and Jadu, is that the future of AR will be formed by how people use it. I know it might seem weird to talk about a fighting game as a medium-defining moment, but I see it as having the potential to inform the early interaction mechanics of AR on a public scale, and more broadly the expectations for how AR fits into our daily lives. Obviously the Apple Vision Pro is going to play a big part in the development of AR—as is the Meta Quest 3, and a host of other notable devices. But we’re still a long way away from everybody feeling comfortable donning headsets and other doodads. In the meantime, the language for how people use AR is emerging organically on mobile games like Jadu.

So this is why I was super excited to get into it with Asad. We look back on his early experiences, reflections on the early days of AR, the formation of Jadu, his thoughts on the state of the medium, and more.

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