Augmented reality 2020: what will the new year bring?

The rapid growth and endless possibilities of AR led to what felt like a gold-rush atmosphere for a while, especially in the hardware sector. However, the market seems to be slowly catching up and consolidating, as evidenced by the fact that some device manufacturers had to file for bankruptcy last year. Meta, ODG and Daqri disappeared from the market in 2019. It remains to be hoped that the expertise built up there will flow into existing devices or the development of new ones.

However, the market for headsets as a whole is not imploding in the slightest. On the contrary: 2020 is expected to see major advances in the area of “AR glasses for everyone”. For example, we are eagerly awaiting the new models from Focal
and Nreal. We can also expect to see AR hardware for end customers from Samsung in the near future.

Amidst all the euphoria, however, it is important to mention that even this year there are unlikely to be masses of people wearing AR glasses in their everyday lives. The replacement of smartphones with augmented reality glasses announced by Apple and Facebook is likely to take at least a few more years.

On the consumer side, AR has already established itself with various filters on Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram. With “Spark AR”, Facebook also has a tool that does not require any programming skills to create cool AR filters yourself – the marketing potential of this application is far from exhausted.

The situation is somewhat different in the AR gaming sector. Since we were all in the Pokémon Go craze in 2016, no other AR game has managed to make such big waves. One possible successor is called “Dragon Quest Walk” and is already extremely successful, at least in Japan. However, it is not yet clear whether the game will be launched here at all. But if it does, it’s definitely worth a test.

It is quite possible that games will also be the AR sector in which the B2C market will make the big breakthrough. A look at the App or Play Store already shows a large selection of AR games, and the trend is rising.

The integration of AR results into Google search results (also available in German since December) is another major step towards bringing AR closer to the general public. In the medium term, it is conceivable that companies should provide AR-enabled content themselves in order to continue to rank highly on Google. This would give the AR breakthrough a further strong boost.

In addition to consumer behavior, developments in the industry will have a major influence on the much-anticipated “AR breakthrough”. Greatly improved mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are already making many use cases that seemed futuristic a short time ago possible. This is also the reason why we see the greatest growth potential in this area for 2020.

The HoloLens 2, which has been announced almost a year ago, will finally go on sale this year. We believe that the successor to Microsoft’s first product has the potential to give the breakthrough an additional strong boost and establish AR technologies in construction and industry.

5G and edge computing are the two keywords that will be most talked about in the infrastructure sector in 2020. It can be assumed that the infrastructure will become faster, more stable and more intelligent. This will help many applications, such as web AR, to become more stable and smoother and thus significantly improve the user experience.

In addition, 5G will help make it easier to connect AR hardware to smartphones wirelessly. The associated elimination of cables will lead to greatly improved wearing comfort and therefore better adaptation. It will also be interesting to see whether the introduction of 5G and the associated offensives by telecoms providers will lead to a boost on the software side.

The topic of augmented reality will also become an even greater focus for us in the new year. On the one hand, we are already working on new AR applications in the consumer sector, while on the other we are increasingly focusing on the development of enterprise AR software. This will also be reflected in the size of the Bitforge team, as we plan to continue growing in all areas (interested parties can find current job offers here).

We will be presenting the first highlight in this area next week at Swissbau. Together with our partner smino, we will be presenting an augmented reality solution for BIM (Building Information Modeling) at Switzerland’s largest construction trade fair. All information can be found at smino.ch/AR.

We also have a few other exciting projects in the Business AR area in the pipeline – stay tuned!