Augmented reality is officially no longer hype

Gartner is a global consulting firm that plays an important role in assessing the marketability of new technologies. Its focus is on developments in the IT sector. The “hype cycle” is used to assess the future prospects of various emerging technologies in terms of their marketability. This can be compared to a product life cycle from economics.

A hype cycle is a model that shows the development of new technologies from invention to marketability. It consists of 5 phases:

At the beginning, a technology appears on the scene. This can be the start of a project, the publication of a research result or another breakthrough. The technology attracts attention for the first time and more players are involved.

Expectations of the new technology are rising due to the continued positive reporting on the topic and increasing investment. The first successful prototypes are coming onto the market and the mood towards the topic is becoming euphoric.

Not all previously built up (often unrealistic) expectations can be fulfilled, and this may even have serious economic consequences. A typical example of this would be the dotcom bubble in 2000.

The “course correction” has led to a more realistic view of the new technology. A serious picture is emerging of the possibilities, but also the limits.

The formerly new technology is recognized and is slowly evolving. However, it has reached market maturity and is no longer a vision of the future.

Gartner now classifies the most important emerging technologies and indicates which stage of the hype cycle a technology is at. In addition, an estimate is made of the number of years in which the productivity plateau can be expected to be reached.

As can be seen in the following comparison of the 2018 and 2019 hype cycles, both AR and mixed reality were completely absent in 2019:

Mixed and augmented reality in particular are no longer utopian concepts. We see this every day at Bitforge. However, the special thing about the removal from the hype cycle is that mixed reality was still on its way to the “valley of disappointment” in 2018, where AR already was. It was estimated to take around 5 to 10 years to reach the productivity plateau.

Just one year later, we can therefore conclude that the time is ripe and that we will probably see a sharp increase in use cases in the near future. The imminent launch of HoloLens 2 will drive this development even further. Especially in the industrial sector.