The Future Of AR

Augmented reality - the process of overlaying a vision of the real world with relevant and useful information or art or other forms of entertainment has moved from the Hollywood imaginings of films like Minority Report to easily accessible applications on even basic smartphones. Along the way there have been developments in professional and industrial headsets from the likes of Microsoft with their hololens products. 

Fields such as medicine are increasingly deploying AR solutions to help them in their daily work and by 2025 the medical AR industry alone is predicted to be worth over $11billion globally. If we consider what the potential growth in all the other industrial and domestic AR markets might be, I thought it would be interesting to have a look at what the future might hold for AR.

Firstly, what is fuelling the growth? Essentially it’s the familiar story of converging technologies. In this case the advancements of digital cameras and ever more powerful processing capabilities in ever smaller devices (smartphones and AR headsets) colliding with developments in AI for visual recognition techniques and also the sheer processing power that can be performed on cloud computing. These things are leading to a much better user experience for AR and this realisation is fueling innovation across all potential uses.

Before we look into professional applications of AR, let’s talk about consumer uses. Up until recently AR for the masses has been a bit of a novelty. There’s been countless face filter apps - which is a kind of AR that adds to or changes a portrait in some humorous or entertaining way. There has been much effort by the advertising industry to bring their client’s products to life in AR on mobile - especially in fashion and automotive. But there has been limited success in this application of AR - for example Mercedes Benz withdrew their cAR app from the German Apple Store after barely a year due to low user uptake. They are not the only ones to suffer from this problem, which can be attributed to the effort it requires to download and install an app that probably takes up quite a bit of space on your handset, just to be able to ‘virtually’ see a shiny car on your coffee table.

But things are changing. New standards supported by the likes of Google and Microsoft are enabling developers to bring AR to mobile web browsers - no longer will users have to spend time downloading resource intensive apps. Add the new technologies of AI and cloud computing to this mix and we’re starting to see some clever applications - such as translation services that replace, in real time, the foreign text in the picture with text in the user's language. I expect to see a huge growth in AR and locative technologies - which is a bit of a cyberpunk clique but I’m looking forward to AR tour guides when I take a city break. Another growth area I expect to see develop is B2C - everything from in-store AR for supermarkets to AR assembly guides from IKEA. 

But this is just scratching the surface, in my next post I’ll look at how AR is going to change industry, medicine, science and academia. Stay tuned.