Augmented Reality is the Next Mass Media

Can you guess how large the AR market will be in 2020? A whooping $83 billion. Half that revenue will come with sale of Augmented reality hardware while the remainder comes from retail, gaming and enterprise uses. The advent of AR technology was a few years back. But it was only widely recognized when the popular Pokemon Go went viral in the gaming world.

AR is essentially superimposing virtual elements into the viewer’s physical environment. Mass adoption of AR is slow but it is certain. The reason for this is the technology is still very new and will take considerable time to get internalized with the general public. The price reduction of AR devices will obviously be a major factor to it as with all other tech devices. Although some high end smartphones do have AR features they don’t have the capability to use AR in a full fledged manner. Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram have made the optimum use of camera in your smartphones for AR. The selfie game was very popular because of the face filters of the snapchat in 2015. The AR app Camera Effects by Facebook also was much appreciated in 2017.

Owing to companies like Facebook, Apple and Google there has been development and launches in the AR platform. Given that they have a huge user base they will naturally deploy their out-of-the-box Augmented reality applications to them. ARkit from Apple, Lens Studio from Snapchat and ARCore from Google has allowed the developers to come up with efficient and engaging AR apps and related features. In the future, there will be many AR features apart from the current virtual tape measures and photo-altering filters. In neurosurgeries it has particularly strong application prospects.

2D content may have bored the hell out of everyone. AR gives superior UX than the current experience of 2D with its vivid 3D experience. The proof is evident from 75,00,00,000 downloads of Pokemon Go game. 1,60,00,000 daily views of Snapchat’s selfie lenses can also be said as another mass adoption of AR. The biggest adoption of AR will be in the field of Ecommerce where static display boards can be enhanced with vivid UX. Ikea is a famous furniture brand and it released an AR app. Users could go through the app and view how the virtual furniture of their choice would fit into their living rooms. That is just one of the many cases.

The tech newsletters and magazines are abound with the trends in the VR industry and AR is relatively less popular. But in fact AR is the one that will have a bigger share among VR/AR technologies. As said in the beginning out of the total $108 billion AR/VR market that will be in 2020 the share of AR is around $83 billion. This in itself says about the potential of AR technology. The global expenditure on AR/VR technologies in 2018 is projected to be around $17.8 billion. This shows the huge market opportunity for such NGUI technologies.