WEBVTT 1 00:00:02.000 --> 00:01:01.000 Speaker A: Geo business is back. It's happening on June 23rd and 24th, 2027 at ExCel London. Register your interest now and we will notify you when registration goes live. Here's why you should be there. Whether you work in urban planning, environmental management, construction or any field where location data matters, geobusiness has something for you. You'll discover real world cases of geospatial technology, get hands on with the latest innovations and hear from leading industry experts solving actual business challenges, experience live demos, insightful seminars and network with thousands of professionals using location intelligence in exciting ways. If you want to stay ahead in this rapidly evolving space, this is where it happens. Join me. It's where the geo community comes together. See you there. 2 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:58.000 Welcome to the GeoMob podcast where we discuss geo innovation in any and all forms, whether for fun or profit. Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the GeoMob podcast. Today we have as our guest Aptin Agagolian, who is the founder and operator of a service called Pict, which I'm excited to learn more about. Because for several years now at geomob events and also just in general, there's been a lot happening in the space of AR and this is exactly the space that PICT operates in. So hopefully we can get an update on the service specifically and kind of the state of the AR landscape in general. Aptin, welcome to the show. Great to have you here. Why don't we start you introduce yourself a bit and give us your background in geospatial and how you came to operate in this space and then we're going to dive into exactly what PICT is. 3 00:01:58.000 --> 00:03:53.000 Hello Ed, it's a pleasure to be here and thank you for having me to give you a little bit of background about myself. I actually didn't get into geospatial from GISS and Maps and that route. My entry has been through advertising. My background has been in advertisement since I was a little child. Every summer I would go back to my family and I would sell magazine ads and billboards and after I decided to start my own company I got into social responsibility marketing and started a platform for that. A little after that we started a video on demand platform which did quite well. We managed to get up to 3 million users and I built an ad aggregator for this and in this process to serve good ads we would gather all these different metadata from the people. So fast forward to the modern day and how we bring the blend the digital and physical spaces and the answer turn out to be it needs to make sense the same way where you are, where a billboard is placed, the positioning of an asset, a 3D asset needs to be also placed like that. So we started with during the NFT season, we started as a tool for airdrops, we call it NFT Race. And I think these are all pre AI. So to make the on chain elements work with the augmented reality took a while. By the time it was finished, we didn't have any demand in NFTs. So we pivoted again into the platform we are today, which is picked. And that's been my entry to the world of geospatial. 4 00:03:53.000 --> 00:04:07.000 Well, I'm definitely intrigued by this, as you say, blend of offline and digital and geospatial. Let's get right into it. What exactly is pict? 5 00:04:07.000 --> 00:05:38.000 Is a use case built on top of the technology that we have built. We build the technology for the machine to have a sense of the room. It's in the same way you tell me Aptin, read the room and I'll be expected to behave in a certain way depending on where we are, what room this is, who is in it and how the people and objects in it interact. And we wanted to build something that gives this understanding to the machine and then reacts to it. But after building a technology as such, we thought, okay, so how can we take it to market? And the easiest use case that we could think of was a marketing one. Or perhaps my background influenced that decision. But we decided to launch this service as a geospatial brand activation. This comes at a time where virality in the traditional sense of digital ads is going out of the window with the flooding of the algorithm. So the brand brands are looking for more experiential in person events and experiences. And the problem with that is that it's not measurable, it's not scalable. So what Pick does is pick combines elements of that digital with that physical, with the scalability of digital. 6 00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:55.000 And so I as a brand can say, help me market my service via some sort of AR type game. Or is that it? Take us through a case study, give us a use case. Exactly. Especially for listeners who maybe haven't seen anything of the service. 7 00:05:55.000 --> 00:07:21.000 So I think that the simplest way to describe it would be to say Pokemon Go, but for brands. But if I want to talk about a real use case. In Central Asia, we collaborated with Burger King and they were launching a new menu. We wanted to narrate this story of going around the city, playing this treasure hunt, learning about different items within that menu. And through this we take some things that are quite unattractive, such as discounts and rewards in the sense that since Coupon.com, we've not had any innovation in this space and we actually rewired the psychology of value creation through the gamification that happens in the physics physical space. And for Burger King campaign, we had 70% play to purchase ratio. Or another example would be we partnered with Red Bull for the Wings for Life marathon that they had. And that was a way to track people running through the space and giving them rewards and being able to ensure that, you know, nobody's cheating. But also it's interactive and how. And each further mile that they go unlocks more rewards for them to win. 8 00:07:21.000 --> 00:07:40.000 So these are some quite well known consumer brands. And so what you're providing technology that these brands then kind of white label and put into an application of their own and then they come with kind of a storyline or something and then you kind of customize it with their look and feel. Is that how it works or how do I. 9 00:07:40.000 --> 00:08:35.000 So the two campaigns I mentioned took place on the picked app. We have a platform that is available in uk, Kazakhstan and Nigeria, but we also have an SDK where just last week we finished a campaign with a brand called Magnum. Magnum is one of the largest retailers in Central Asia and they embedded our SDK. So within their loyalty program, someone clicks and picked opens, but with their. With their design and people go around depending on where they wanted these assets. So in this case they wanted to increase foot traffic to their stores. People go collect these different things and for the last piece of reward they have to walk into the store even if they don't buy anything. 10 00:08:35.000 --> 00:09:03.000 I see. And so basically the customer walks into the store and then all of a sudden what they get like some kind of notification in the app or something that they've now gained points or gotten to the next level or get some kind of reward or something. I see, exactly. And so what is the motivation for most of the players? Is it more about having fun or it's to get these rewards or. I guess it depends on the particular campaign. 11 00:09:03.000 --> 00:10:23.000 There are several components that come together, I think, to make up this journey. One is why should I even play from the beginning? And one, you play because you win something from it. This is a real world engagement, but also with a real world value. I'm in the physical space, but also I win something from it. I win a burger from Burger King, I win a concert ticket. I win. We did a. We did a campaign in London and we were giving away Arsenal tickets. And so there is the reward side. But then once you enter and once I have that first hook, there is the element of competition. So are you playing with friends and getting point multipliers? Element of collaboration. Who's the top of the leaderboard and thus winning bigger, more prizes. But lastly, well, for me it's. Being a co founder of this is easy to say, but we've had feedback from a lot of our users that they find it fun, that there's something to look forward to when they leave the house and this mystery of where it is and where it's going to take us next. 12 00:10:23.000 --> 00:10:41.000 I see. So they don't necessarily know what the challenge is. And so in your application you're getting the user's location from the phone and then based on that, then you know what you need to display to them in the AR context. Is that it? Or what needs to happen where. 13 00:10:41.000 --> 00:12:31.000 So there are different ways we configure this in order to avoid privacy issues. We work on a proximity basis to a certain location. Then in that certain location I have a augmented reality activated as an asset that's placed in that location and anchored to a certain space. But coming, coming from a ethical marketing and tech for good background. After having built the version that has run more than 230,000 geospatial activations, we have been moving toward building the next generation of this where a user's location shall not be passed, not even in form of proximity. We are working on a protocol which allows this geospatial intelligence to happen through edge computing, privacy computing, auxiliary servers, and to make sure that the dangers of the previous era of Internet where metadata was used to exploit people. And I've built an ad aggregator. So I've stood on the other side, profiled these datas to target better advertisement and get better returns. But now with this digital physical world and intelligence that is being built, we are working on a way to deliver this without sharing, deliver intelligence without sharing individuals information, private information. 14 00:12:31.000 --> 00:12:51.000 Okay, and maybe we should back up for a second, give us kind of the state of AR in general. These tasks you're describing, they're happening on the phone or this is like people with like the goggles or Google Glass or all of the above or how does this, how do I envision this? 15 00:12:51.000 --> 00:13:53.000 So we, we live in a, in the world of this variety of devices that they're quite expensive, so you can't expect everyone to have everything. I, I remember Vision Pro came out, they built an app for it, a custom app, not our phone app. Rendering on the Vision Pro. We were one of the first 500 apps on it and I think in the first month I got less than 10 downloads because people don't have it. So in the world of ar, you build platform agnostic if you have the goggles, a better experience. If you don't have the goggles, you should be able to use your phone. And an issue with the world of AR is often we build for the high end devices, but the majority of the population doesn't have those. So we're built in a way that whatever you have, you can go into the app and have the same experience. 16 00:13:53.000 --> 00:14:35.000 It's been several years now. All these ideas around AR and Facebook made huge investments and Apple came out with their goggles and stuff like that. And I can just say for me personally, I still have never seen any of these kind of in the wild or I don't know anyone developing on these platforms. And so it seems we're still quite. It seems like it hasn't really been solved in terms of the use case or the price or whatever. It feels like the technology is way ahead of the actual market Adoption. Is that kind of what you see as well? 17 00:14:35.000 --> 00:15:15.000 I have to agree with this and whenever this comes up, I like to remember Google Glasses that came out about a decade ago and I thought that was such a sleek product, it looked beautiful. The promise was great, but the market wasn't ready for it and the demand wasn't there. Years later we come back with these other rounds of glasses and different generations of them and they're not mainstream still. But a problem that I think this industry faces is the assumption that these glasses are needed for that interaction. 18 00:15:15.000 --> 00:15:28.000 Well, I mean, I think Pokemon, the Pokemon phenomenon showed that there is demand for this type of use case, but it doesn't need the glasses. Right? Yeah. 19 00:15:28.000 --> 00:16:05.000 So I like to think that as a. Before we go into the whole glasses generation and putting phones away for this wearable device, I think we're going to see a shift in a behavioral change. A shift where instead of looking down at our phones, we look straight ahead at our phones and even that's still not there. I actually invite you to try this. The next time you do this. Hold your phone up. After doing it for a little bit, you get tired, the neck gets tired, the arms. 20 00:16:05.000 --> 00:16:07.000 Yeah, it's true, that's true. 21 00:16:07.000 --> 00:16:56.000 But ultimately this I think is going to be the first round of this behavioral change because spatial intelligence is here. And this is partly derived by AI in the sense that. Okay, LLMs are cool chatbots are cool, but what are you beyond a 2D screen? How do you actually get part of the world where things are happening? And sure, a lot of the economy lives on a 2D screen, but in a real world scenario, a chatbot only does so much, and that interaction is very limited in comparison to one which is blended with the physical space. 22 00:16:56.000 --> 00:18:04.000 Maybe let's poke a little under kind of the technical hood here. So how does this all work? I mean, as someone who has never developed any kind of AR thing, here's kind of my assumption of how things work. And you tell me if I'm wildly wrong here. My phone knows where I am as longitude, latitude, and then somehow that's being sent either on the device to some database of locations or back to the server. And then when I get close to the Burger King or whatever, you've got some sort of database with a geofence around every Burger King. And then when it sees that I'm in, the geofence, then says, okay, time to give Ed a free hamburger or something. Is it that basic? And maybe then it displays some kind of visual. You display, I don't know, an exploding hamburger or something. That gets me excited or whatever. But is that the concept here? And what are the technical innovations here? Is it that basic or is it more complex than all this? 23 00:18:04.000 --> 00:20:26.000 So what you're describing is closer to the first version that we released to the market, which I think in our case, basic was good because I need to excite you, but I also need to explain to you how it works. And it started with a treasure hunt. Similar mechanism of you go around, you collect different things. As you collect them, you build on top of each other and ultimately unlock a reward, or you collect more and climb a leaderboard. And, you know, I initially did, and I think this is. This is about two years ago, about a year and a half ago, I thought, this is too basic, similar to what you say. I said, how can we, on this simple mechanism, deploy something that's a lot more exciting? So what we did is we launched a thing where you would collect different layers of music. If you ever seen how music is being composed, there are different lines of the drum melody and you collect different ones, which ultimately created a song. A song, yes, but that is. That is how it started. And then we slowly moved into different layers of interaction between the individual and the object. So are you able to throw it? Are you able to kick it? Can you grab it? Can you place it? Now, can you have multiple of them? And what does that mean in the sense of the space you're in to create a sort of minigame that you don't just collect it because you're there or you found it, but are you able to collect it in solving a spatial puzzle and then moving into the intelligence layer of can the object talk to you about the space you're in? Like a character that would be there? Can the object walk you through the space and guide you around and tell you where to go and suggest different things to you? And I think that is where it made full circle between the geospatial technology, the AR as the interface and AI as the brain behind it. 24 00:20:26.000 --> 00:21:09.000 What is the response from brands on this kind of thing? Because based on what you're describing, and it really requires quite kind of a powerful kind of storytelling element. You know, it's not just as simple as like, you know, okay, we're going to spread, you know, the, the coupons around the city and then people walk around and they find it or whatever. Like it seems like for this really to work you really need to invest probably in the creative element, you know, the design, the story, the. And then obviously probably also the promotion to, to get people to engage with it. So that sounds quite complex for brands that might be used to just like, let me buy some billboards or something. 25 00:21:09.000 --> 00:22:43.000 Definitely. I mean, there's two ways to look at it and one is that the complexity is there, but it is also an ability to narrate, to give a narrative that is not possible before this. Because for the first time this approach takes us from an intrusive ad which is going out of fashion. The younger population absolutely hates it. Gen Z is reported to react negatively to it, to a format where we're not asking, we're not showing you something, asking for a reaction, see an ad, click on it. We're placing you in a, in a story which would then cause, be the cause of an action from your side. And that action is to go somewhere. We work with a football club and we help them increase the stadium turn up through this storytelling, through this ability that this brand is part of this city that we live in and this neighborhood. And no, this is intensely hyper localized to every street, to every alley, to every shop where we are. And we are able to deliver this at scale because of this technology, whereas an in person event or a set of billboards will not be able to. 26 00:22:43.000 --> 00:22:58.000 And how are you taking that to market then? You work mainly with the agencies or I'm just wondering which brands have the, the capability even to grasp onto this kind of opportunity, you know, so I've 27 00:22:58.000 --> 00:24:38.000 worked with big and small brands and, well, I have to be honest, I'm a technical founder, so I'm more on the building side of this. But we work with big brands such as the ones I've already named. But we've also worked with smaller brands. And you're very right, it's like it's hard to explain what it is unless it's in your hands and you're doing it. So we built a dashboard to help brands launch a campaign, ask them their goals, and then launch a campaign tailored to their goals within 10 minutes. So then a small brand can also launch a campaign with several main goals. So are we trying to drive foot traffic, increase the number of visits? Are we trying to increase the engagement while an individual is within a venue? Are we trying to build a story within the city, where we are with the landmarks and what is around that? That that last one requires more creative, creative prowess, if you will. But on one side, the simpler you are, the engagement comes from how the reward mechanism. And if you're not investing too much in the reward, then it's what value am I delivering to the user? And that becomes the creative element, that becomes the story, that becomes the interaction. 28 00:24:38.000 --> 00:25:09.000 Give us, you know, our audiences, like yourself, mainly on the kind of technical side. So maybe take us through some of the challenges that you've had to overcome, especially at scale, like what are, what are kind of the geospatial issues in the real world that might not have been apparent at the beginning when you got started on this? You know, I can imagine you have lots of people moving around like some kind of issues must turn up. 29 00:25:09.000 --> 00:25:34.000 So I think when we talk scale, I think it's important to take a step back because there haven't been many platforms at large scale. I mean, if we take the case of Pokemon Go aside, every large AR story that we see is the 30 00:25:34.000 --> 00:25:35.000 back 31 00:25:34.000 --> 00:26:45.000 camera, the front camera, where it's the face filters and whatnot, nothing geospatial. And when we look at the other side, we don't have anything in the scales of millions. Putting Pokemon Go aside, there are some infrastructure provider companies, but no, no consumer platform. But at the scale that, at the scale that we operate, I think scale comes. The scale issue comes down to one individual interacting with many items within the city they're in and anchoring to a particular location. So do I have the same experience over and over in that location? Because the location drift is a very serious thing and GPS has a degree of error and not Every space is mapped accurately and then if you add another player, this is where complexity explodes with do they see the same object anchored to the same exact point with minimum, minimum error? 32 00:26:45.000 --> 00:27:00.000 Oh, I see. So it's like, is each individual playing the game kind of in parallel with the others? Are they? Actually what I see depends on what the other people have already done and things like that. I could imagine that does make it much more complicated. 33 00:27:00.000 --> 00:28:16.000 Think about it. In a turn, what you see is affected by what others have done. So what I might leave somewhere for you to find or something that you went to grab and it was there, but it's not there because I picked it up but that you can think of it as a turn based form rather than me and you pointing our phone and there is shared ar. It's a growing scene, but I think overall we're still a bit far from it and due to two points. One is, can you afford to map this space? If you can map this space beforehand and have these points of truth that not just your GPS but the angle and the distance and depth become factors to which the object is placed or are we, you know, just taking some rough data from the GPS and where that is and placing it and then your gps, you can be standing next to me and you could have a slight deviation. So then there is a drift that happens from that. 34 00:28:16.000 --> 00:29:53.000 Well, I have to admit I find this fascinating because of the combination of all the, you know, the technology, the creative element to make a compelling experience, the business aspects of brands getting involved. This is, I'm fascinated by the kind of possibilities here. I though I even, I will say so far, again with the one exception of course, of Pokemon Go, that it feels like the examples I've seen so far, people have typically mastered one piece, be it the technology or maybe the story piece, but it doesn't feel like they've all kind of brought it together in one compelling package to really hit the mass market yet. So hopefully picked us on the path to doing that. And we talked before we started recording about hopefully we're going to get you to come to GMOB London. We should tell the listeners you're of course based in London, so hoping to get you at our next London event to give a talk about this, to give a demo and who knows, maybe we've set up some kind of engagement and we can, you know, people can actually try it out and I don't know what the game would be but I mean it's so fascinating, as I said, getting all those pieces correct of the Technology operating in the real world on all kinds of different devices and things and having a compelling storyline and you know, I just think it's so challenging to get all that together. So really fascinating. 35 00:29:53.000 --> 00:31:17.000 Upton, thank you. For me and I agree because first problem is making sure all these technologies can work together. Second problem is building something with it, deploying a use case that actually carries value because something that's just cool, it does not live long in the real world. But what is the biggest challenge right now for me is okay, how can I build this and protect the individuals? Because assuming and being in this technology, I do assume that the future would be me and a device and an intelligent device where understands where I am and what's happening in this space and interacts me with that in that sense is how do I build it in a manner that is private and that cannot and where users cannot be exploited in combination of zero knowledge machine learning and on device edge computing and only working with proofs and attestations. But for geospatial data rather than traditional attestations of zero knowledge blockchain, well, a 36 00:31:17.000 --> 00:31:34.000 lot to think about there. Hopefully we can go deeper when you present at gmov. So assuming this has raised people's interest, what would be the best way for them to learn more? How can they get in touch with you? How can they try it out? How can they see what you're doing? 37 00:31:34.000 --> 00:32:00.000 Pict is available on App Store and Google Play and I would love to have a conversation with anyone on LinkedIn or email. We build these interactions and if anyone has any cool idea of a use case, we're happy to explore and build them. 38 00:32:00.000 --> 00:32:15.000 Okay, very nice. Well, of course make sure we get those links in the show notes and I do hope that we're able to get it in our hands at our next GeoMob London. So we're going to work on making that happen. 39 00:32:15.000 --> 00:32:16.000 Perfect. 40 00:32:16.000 --> 00:32:18.000 Thank you so much for coming on the show, Upton. Good luck. 41 00:32:18.000 --> 00:32:23.000 It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Ed, 42 00:32:23.000 --> 00:32:57.000 thanks for joining us today on the GeoMob podcast. We hope you enjoyed the discussion. You can get the show notes over on the website, which is@thegeomob.com and while you're there, you can sign up for our monthly newsletter and find links to our accounts on Mastodon and LinkedIn so you can stay up to date on all our upcoming events. We hope to see you at an event soon.