• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, August 8, 2013

Consumers are very gradually learning to point their phones at things to receive benefit.

For years, marketers enamored with QR codes have been plastering them onto newspaper and magazine pages as well as billboards.

And years ago, AR (augmented reality) company Layar allowed house shoppers in the Netherlands to point their phones at houses for sale and instantly see related information about those houses displayed on their phone screens.

After moving to printed pages and various other flat surfaces, the next logical step is to streamline the road to friction-free mobile shopping.

We’re talking, of course, of the one-click-buy after the point.

Though not massive in scale, it’s becoming clear that a certain number of people will scan codes and use AR.

For example, Blippar, the two-year-old AR company, found that half a million people used AR on a Heinz ketchup container.

Of those scanned, almost half (41%) of those consumers viewed the recipes (try it, it does work).

I caught up with Ambarish Mitra, CEO and co-founder of Blippar, who traveled to New York from Blippar’s London headquarters this week. He has no illusions about the mass acceptance of AR.

“Some people see it as amazing, some see it as gimmicky,” says Mitra. “Big publishers have been shoving it (AR) down their throats, but it turns out consumers liked it.”

While Blippar is hardly a household name, many companies that have used it are, including

Heinz, Wrigley’s Gum, Domino’s, Stylist Magazine and Cadbury.

“Of the first 100 brands we went to, 94 said no, says Mitra.The other six saw immediate benefit.”

The initial phase of codes and AR is that the marketer receives valuable back-end data on usage patterns, demographics and location information.

For commerce, a company can add a ‘buy’ button, though the actual transaction has to be done outside of the AR button, such as through the company’s mobile website.

The next move for AR is into commerce. “It’s a very natural fit, to point at something for information and with one click you own the product,” says Mitra. One publication already sells $2,000 to $6,000 worth of goods a week through AR, he says.

With the current mobile payments maze of offerings, any number of transaction capability companies could handle the paying part.

While any type of mass adoption of AR is likely several years away, three million people have downloaded the Blippar app (93% of them using iOS, 7% Android) and a majority (65%) are active users, according to Mitra.

While most mobile users don’t yet use AR, those who do are ultimately likely to see one more option on their AR display: click to buy.