Mixed Reality Industry – Mobile AR already boasts of being

Mobile AR already boasts of being a platform for consumers. Digi-Capital expects the active installation base on Internet OS and AR-based mobile messaging platforms to exceed 1 billion people by 2020. The leaders in mobile AR are primarily major messaging platforms such as Facebook, ByteDance and Snap, as well as OS-based mobile AR platforms from Apple and Google. In June, Snap stated that “170 million chatters engage with AR every day, almost 30 times a day.” So it’s easy to see how mobile AR has become an integral part of the usage cycle for a large portion of messaging users. It’s still early days with smart glasses, but their critical use cases may be more than just a revolutionary doorway to success for mobile AR. Adi Tatarko, CEO of Houzz, explained how their mobile AR capabilities have enabled an 11-fold increase in e-commerce revenue through an already successful app, “As a technology company, we pride ourselves on always being at the forefront of the best technology and being able to widely apply it to our own industry.” “Thus, monopolistic mobile operators can have a disproportionate impact on the mobile AR ecosystem compared to insurgent startups. By comparison, most of us are active users of the world’s largest consumer platform: mobile. Mobile AR goes a long way toward explaining why messaging platforms are so valuable, as they lead to mass consumption of user-generated content that can be used to sell advertising. Apple, Google, Niantic and others are positioning themselves for the future of the technology, and it could be an important catalyst in the mobile AR and smart glasses ecosystem. So while mobile AR still has many challenges to overcome in order to move beyond messaging and gaming, the installed base seems to be a given. In the case of smart glasses, it’s also too early to tell, but app developers may need a mental model closer to mobile than enterprise to make the frequency work.