Jay Wright, general manager of Vuforia at PTC, holds a Viewmaster AR viewer.
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The DeanBeat: What Pokémon Go has done for augmented reality

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

For more than five years, Vuforia has been selling augmented reality. More than 30,000 apps have used the Vuforia platform for AR, which is owned by enterprise technology company PTC. Another 37,000 apps are in development, and there are more than 250,000 registered developers making AR apps, which use glasses or smartphones to overlay computer animations on the real world.

And while those apps have been installed more than 288 million times for things like Lego’s interactive toys or Skylanders Battlecast cards, people viewed AR as a curiosity or a niche, said Jay Wright, president and general manager of Vuforia, said in an interview with GamesBeat.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.