Smart glasses had a rocky start, with the hotly anticipated Google Glass all but failing upon release. But as new vendors enter the game with novel product developments, all signs point to smart glasses getting their second wind.
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The smart glasses market has matured, and new iterations are finding their place outside the consumer tech sphere. Analysts at Technavio say smart glasses are about to take off in the industrial sector, with market revenue growing by leaps and bounds over the next four years.
In 2015, the market for smart glasses in industrial applications was in its nascent stage, but declining prices will drive the market to a value of $1.49 billion in 2017. This market will continue it’s aggressive upwards trajectory through 2020, to hit a value of $17.84 billion in that year—that’s a CAGR of 146.3% from 2015-2020.
A big reason for such high growth rates is the expected decline in the average selling price of smart glasses over the forecast period. Components like processors and sensors are already becoming less expensive, and costs are expected to plummet further with the development of standardized optical systems.
But while there is a consensus that these devices are undergoing a renaissance, there seems to be little agreement on how industry will use them.
A Seeking Alpha article published in July said that smart glasses helped an Airbus crew assemble cabin seats in one-sixth of the usual time. And there are other similar stories of proof of concept trials for smart glasses for these procedures, but widespread adoption is still just out of reach.
The technology has had several false starts and end-users in the consumer, enterprise and industrial segments seem to be experiencing smart glass fatigue. The glasses are still very much a novelty, most people require some sort of corrective lens to use them properly, and the technology is not quite up to scratch yet.
And yet the growth boom projected by Technavio and many other research firms still remains elusive.
Perhaps smart glasses are doomed to remain in the world of prognostication, with little real-world pay-out.
