Apple’s acquisition of Metaio in May followed months of rumors that the company was exploring AR to compliment services like maps and, unofficially, to unseat the less-than-popular Google Glass.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “Metaio has worked on a technology that allows people wearing Google Glass-like eyewear to make any real world surface into a virtual touch screen. It also created software to let developers create tablet apps that flash repair instructions across the screen when the tablet’s camera is pointed at machines such as car engines or a printer.”
It’s easy to see how Apple was planning to leverage the technology, but the quiet acquisition of the German AR company was more than just a strategic move—it also helped cement augmented reality as an unavoidable part of our future.
In an article on theMIX Agency discussing the deal, James Au points out that the acquisition means that almost every major tech company (including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, HTC, Yahoo!, and now Apple) has some sort of stake in AR.
The question that many people are now asking is: Why? For all intents and purposes, the consumer side of AR has failed to take off in any tangible way.
But it’s not necessarily the consumer side that is going to drive AR, at least not right now. According to recent analysis, the marketing and advertising sector accounted for 35% of the overall mobile AR market in 2014, and this is expected to increase to 44% by 2019, as enterprises take more interest in AR technology.
Overall, the augmented reality market for marketing and advertising is expected to grow at a cumulative average growth rate of 105.7% from 2014-2019, according to Technavio analysts.
Pepsi, Toyota and Ray-Ban are all getting into the AR game
The marketing and advertising sector is one of the earliest adopters of AR and also one of the largest markets for it, thanks to the massive advertising budgets these organizations have to play with.
Companies that have already run AR ads include Pepsi, Volkswagen, Toyota, Ray-Ban, Heinz, Pizza Hut, and Coca-Cola, and several other advertisers are experimenting with AR to allow consumers to better interact with their brands.
AR technology: Blending digital content with the physical world
Ambarish Mitra recently wrote on Mobile Marketing Daily that, “in any quickly growing market, the industry’s ability to innovate new technologies is exponentially faster than its ability to identify valuable utility for the end user.”
AR is a perfect example of this. Despite the strong market growth and technological developments, lack of content and connectivity, hardware limitations and interoperability issues between mobile platforms will always cause problems for end-users.
But smartphone manufacturers are working to mitigate these challenges by giving mobile devices the next-gen treatment. New products on the market and being integrated with depth-sensing cameras, Pico projectors, SLAM technology and other upgrades to make AR not only feasible, but usable for the average consumer.
And as AR becomes easier, it also becomes more attractive to advertisers, which will ultimately solidify its value for end-users and recolutionize how consumers consume and engage with information.
