Author: Arman Atoyan
I’m the co-founder and CEO at ARLOOPA. We are an AR/VR development company with 50+ apps and games in the stores.
Our flagship product is the ARLOOPA app, which is one of the top AR platforms globally.
Our app offers marker-based, markerless, and location-based AR functionality all in one package. And we’ve been developing the app since 2015.
When we were doing Augmented Reality back in 2014 many of our friends didn’t believe that one day this technology would take off, but now they regret, as they see how heavily Apple, Facebook, and Google are betting on AR/VR nowadays.
Our app was initially a B2B platform with a mission to provide brands and businesses with new tools to increase their customer engagement. We’ve successfully worked with brands and businesses like Coca-Cola, GSK, WWF, and Maxima.
About 1.5 years ago, we introduced markerless functionality based on Apple’s ARkit and Google’s ARCore where you don’t need a marker to see AR content in your environment.
Technology allows you to locate AR content by just scanning a flat surface. Then the magic happens — you can see the persistent 3D object in your environment and even move it around to observe it from all sides.
Our first success came in the Christmas Eve when we introduced Van Gogh Room visiting experience.
It organically reached more than 10M people on Facebook only (this is on one page only).
Afterwards, we started featuring the great works of talented artists in our library, eventually converting this library into a store, where most of the content is still FREE of charge.
Recently we started experiencing a download growth from India.
Google Play Stats — 86.97% of the new users are coming from India.
I asked our ASO specialist to figure out from where we were getting this traffic and jokingly I noted that maybe someone told the public on TV to download the ARLOOPA app and that’s why we are unable to track the traffic source.
We were at the middle of a standup (as we are working remotely 2 times a day we are catching up with the team to see how projects are progressing) when I eventually found video of a vlogger who was showing an ARLOOPA app demonstration video. I saw the name of a TV channel as it was a video recorded from a TV screen.
In this Video we saw the TV Logo — Asian News
My team members started to dig in the net to find the source.
And we’ve been surprised by finding out that more than 100 videos are available on YouTube and Facebook shared by official accounts and newspapers, where teachers are showing #AugmentedReality objects with the ARLOOPA App and explaining the subject.
At first, we got joyful knowing that our app is featured on many reputable sources until I noticed that our logo (we have a watermark logo on the videos and photos captured by our app) was covered by some strange logo, while in some videos it was simply cropped.
You can see that a part of the ARLOOPA logo is visible under their logo.
The funniest thing was that one of the teachers without shame was telling a TV camera that it took him 2 months to develop this ☺
I would think that maybe the guy meant a system of making and sharing videos via Zoom, Hangouts, or anything else, but I couldn’t really believe that people who cropped or covered our logo tried to show our app as their achievement.
We have an old saying in Armenia, it says “Robbers and prostitutes have 100 days”, in this case it was less than a week.
Those people owe us 100.000 downloads because if they didn’t hide or cut our logo we would get 10 times more downloads, or even more.
You can see our logo is covered by the school or other company logo
On the other said, there are also people who have respected our work and have given proper attribution or at least have left the logo untouched.
This is all we ask in return for the great tools and features we continuously develop to promote better education, entertainment, and art.
Our mission has always been to provide tools and empower people from all around the world to create amazing content for their audiences. Nothing can stand on our way to hold up this mission and to help more people express themselves on a new level.
Hence, I’d like to express my sincere gratitude to those who respect others’ rights and the hard work we carry each day to keep the ARLOOPA app free and accessible for everyone.
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