Aurasma, a leader in the consumer-facing augmented reality (AR) space (and one of our long-time favorites too) has been at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) festival, not only as a sponsor (and throwing an awesome party on Saturday night), but also in the Expo Hall with a booth featuring some of their latest demos and interactive stations.

This morning, Aurasma announced a new patent, which will add geolocation to the platform to deliver targeted augmented reality experiences. In the same announcement, the company announced that the platform has surpassed 100,000 global customers, adding more than 60,000 new customers in the past 12 months alone.

The Aurasma platform provides far more than “simple” augmented reality–in addition to using smart devices to provide information, animations, and other enhancements to the real world, it uses any pre-defined image, object, or even place as the trigger for the AR content. For example, a company could use its logo as a trigger for an advertisement, directions to the nearest location, or any other online content (the company calls these triggered events “auras”).

The augmented reality market continues to explode as people searching or interacting with companies demand interactive experiences tailored to their needs and expectations, not static search results and slow monolithic websites.
–Annie Weinberger, GM, HP Aurasma

If you happen to be at SXSW, the booth number is 501–you should really check it out. And you can get even more at a session on March 17th: “300% Mobile Lift is a Real and Augmented Reality.” Emery Skolfield, Vice President of Digital Strategy & Marketing, Office Depot and Annie Weinberger, GM of Aurasma will be the featured speakers.

The free Aurasma mobile app (for Android here and iOS here) can view the auras and share the experience. Feeling creative? There is a selection of tools within the application for users to experiment with and create auras of their own.