As you likely know, one of AR’s foundational principles is to fuse the digital and physical. The real world is a key part of that formula… and real-world relevance is often defined by location. That same relevance and scarcity are what drive real estate value….location, location, location.
Synthesizing these factors, one of AR’s battlegrounds will be in augmenting the world in location-relevant ways. That could be wayfinding with Google Live View, or visual search with Google Lens. Point your phone (or future glasses) at places and objects to contextualize them.
AR’s traction over the past few years has occurred mostly through the smartphone camera. As our research arm ARtillery Intelligence quantified in its mobile AR revenue forecast, this early AR modality has reached scale by piggy-backing on a ubiquitous device we all carry.
But that scale has a tradeoff. Mobile AR’s quantitative benefits come with qualitative detriments. Though AR enjoys mobile’s sheer reach, smartphones aren’t the technology’s optimal vessel. There, AR is overshadowed by other established and primary smartphone activities.
Beyond taking a back seat to other mobile use cases, AR’s use on smartphones can be awkward and un-ergonomic. Arm…
Though it may not be as central of a driving force as it is at Snapchat, Facebook is intent on lens-based use cases to enhance social connections. This is one of many pieces in Facebook’s spatial computing puzzle, which also includes AR-cloud development and, of course, VR.
The endgame is ubiquitous VR and AR glasses, but like many other tech giants driving towards that future, mobile AR is a key stop along that journey. For Facebook, that manifests in similar ways as it does at Snap — as lens-based enhancements to multimedia sharing.
VR traction over the past few years has been slower than many had anticipated. But it’s still finding small wins and is growing at a fairly healthy pace. This leads to several questions such as who uses VR? What are their motivations? And what experiences resonate most?
So we set out for answers. Working closely with Thrive Analytics, ARtillery Intelligence authored questions to be fielded through its established survey engine to more than 46,000 U.S. adults. The result is Wave V of the research, and a narrative report we published to unpack the results.
This is also the topic of…
Emerging technologies often follow a common evolutionary path from novelty to utility. It’s all about fun & games before settling into lasting value in everyday mundane utilities. Consider the iPhone’s arc from novelty apps like iBeer and Zippo to staples like Uber and Spotify.
The same happened on the web. After the early 2000’s bubble burst from an inflated atmosphere of grandiose visions, the web eventually reached those elevated valuations… but in a different form. The web’s killer apps are decidedly mundane: search, email, news and productivity.
Mundane sounds like a bad word, but it’s not. The above killer apps…
A common AR industry sentiment is that the smartphone will pave the way for smart glasses. Before AR glasses achieve consumer-friendly specs and price points, AR’s delivery system is the device we all have in our pockets. There, it can stimulate demand for AR experiences.
This thinking holds up, but a less-discussed product class could have a greater impact in priming consumers for AR glasses: wearables. Among other outcomes, AR glasses’ cultural barriers could be lessened by conditioning consumers to wearing sensors on their bodies.
Meanwhile, tech giants are motivated toward wearables. They’re each building wearables strategies that support or…
As you likely know, one of AR’s foundational principles is to fuse the digital and physical. The real world is a key part of that formula….and real-world relevance is often defined by location. That same relevance and scarcity are what drive real estate value….location, location, location.
Synthesizing these factors, one of AR’s battlegrounds will be in augmenting the world in location-relevant ways. That could be wayfinding with Google Live View, or visual search with Google Lens. Point your phone (or future glasses) at places and objects to contextualize them.
A common AR industry sentiment is that the smartphone will pave the way for smart glasses. Before AR glasses achieve consumer-friendly specs and price points, AR’s delivery system is the device we all have in our pockets. There, it can stimulate demand for AR experiences.
This thinking holds up, but a less-discussed product class could have a greater impact in priming consumers for AR glasses: wearables. Among other outcomes, AR glasses’ cultural barriers could be lessened by conditioning consumers to wearing sensors on their bodies.
Meanwhile, tech giants are motivated toward wearables. They’re each building wearables strategies that support or…
It’s clear that mobile AR is where the scale is today, given 3 billion+ global smartphones. As for the portion that’s AR-compatible, the common industry rally cry is that there are 1 billion+ AR-enabled smartphones. That figure applies to ARkit and ARCore-compatible smartphones.
But if you pan back to all platforms, such as Snapchat’s Lens Studio and Facebook’s Spark AR, the AR-ready universe is larger. And the number that matters most is active users across these platforms, projected to exceed 800 million (de-duped) by the end of 2021.
As we examined recently, this contains a mix of platforms. In addition…
In a rather large moment for the AR industry, Snap today unveiled developer-facing AR glasses. As the next generation of its Spectacles camera glasses, the hardware features optical and display systems for the first time. That’s right, Spectacles are now true AR glasses.
Before going into hardware specs and strategy, one point to reiterate is the key qualifier above: ‘developer-facing.’ These glasses won’t be for sale, but rather made available for select Lens Studio developers to envision and prototype AR experiences with a tighter feedback loop.
In other words, these glasses are built with the primary purpose of giving developers…
