• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 7, 2016

Augmented reality (AR) ad platform Blippar, which built a visual search engine, announced Monday the release of its self-service suite of tools. It's launching out of beta with more than 4,000 users by brands and agencies ranging from General Mills to SapientNitro APAC.

"In the past five years, the world has been encountering more and more AR experiences in their daily lives and, to a large extent, this has been spearheaded by advertising," Ambarish Mitra, Blippar co-founder and CEO, wrote in an email to Search Marketing Daily. "We predict that in the next couple of years, AR will become a mainstream method of advertising and more marketing budgets will start shifting that direction."

Mitra believes Blippar can help advertiser and marketer tap into a market "projected to grow to $120 billion in 2020," according to Digi-Capital, while remaining at the forefront of this shift.

MaxFactor has built a range of AR pieces with curated digital content from product reviews to tutorials creating "a personal makeup artist in your pocket." With this campaign, MaxFactor is engaging with their consumer at the most powerful moment: when they are within eyesight or arm's reach of their products.

The company in March announced $45 million in funding and said it would build a visual search engine to help users identify visual objects.

The Blippar Augmented Reality Creation Tool Kit allows anyone to create AR experiences from advanced gaming and virtual try-ons to simple interactive print and packaging. There are two levels of toolsets. Blippbuilder, which doesn't require any coding skills, allows users to drag and drop images in a Web interface to create AR experiences and Blippbuilder Script, the tool Blippar uses to create campaigns because it provides more bells and whistles, allows developers to create advanced AR experiences in JavaScript, a coding language known by most developers.

Advertisers can find the Blippbuilder tools on the company's Web site and through the SAP Store. The company partnered with SAP to make Blippbuilder available to its large customer base, helping advanced industries apply our best-in-class technology for enterprise and marketing use-cases.