VIDEO INTERVIEW: Ambarish Mitra, CEO of fast-rising startup Blippar, believes Augmented Reality (AR) has the potential to have as transformative an impact on our lives as the internet, but only if the industry drops use of this “very technical” phrase and consumers become as accustomed to ‘blipping’ as they are with ‘tweeting’ today.

Blippar is a company that is number 19 on CNBC’s 2015 ‘Disruptor 50 companies’ that are “revolutionising the business landscape” with their innovations, along with well-known names like Uber and Airbnb.

The Blippar app “converts AR as a cognitive behaviour” by partnering with brands and publishers, said Mitra, who says the company likes to use the word ‘blipping’ to describe the action of users pointing their phone’s camera towards anything to find out more about it, and wants the word to become synonymous with the act, just as ‘tweeting’ has become synonymous with the more technical word microblogging.

“From the very first day we positioned ourselves as a consumer platform where brands and publishers make all their content and physical assets into an interactive medium via Blippar,” he told Mobile World Live in a recent interview.

Last year, Blippar bought another AR company, Amsterdam-based Layar, and together the two have 50 million users and two billion interactions on the platforms to date, with more than 2,500 brands and 86,000 publishers on board.

Mitra believes the AR industry has been quietly shaping up in the last 10 years, but has mainly focused on developing the technology rather than finding use cases.

“We are the only company that actually came up with a consumer proposition,” he said, adding that its use of the technology is a “pure content experience with a clear utility for the user”.

Blippar has also made sure to “make everything measurable,” so brands could know exactly what their ROI is, and Mitra claims his clients have seen “phenomenal” results. Pepsi, for example, has had 55,000 hours of engagement with just one campaign.

He believes visual search is next on the horizon: Users are not always able to describe what they see but AR can “transcend” language barriers and become a form of visual search, telling consumers what they are looking at.

“The world of AR is changing. We have only scratched the surface,” he commented.

However, Mitra ruled out a move into the Virtual Reality space.

Click here to watch the full interview.