
Recent trends of the last two years including Pokemon Go, Snapchat’s AR filters, and furniture visualization technology (e.g., Wayfair/IKEA) point to Augmented Reality as an emerging trend over Virtual Reality technologies (e.g., Hololens, Oculus) in years prior. I believe this shift towards AR has been catalyzed by emerging developer frameworks like Unity and Apple’s ARKit, but also due to the lower barrier of entry on top of existing mobile phone technologies vs. clunky (and potentially overpriced) first-generation VR headsets.
There is no doubt that both AR and VR will continue to mature as one of the more exciting technologies with companies like Magic Leap leading the way, but which startups and applications of AR/VR seem the most promising specifically in the enterprise workspace?
Remote Education/Support in the Workplace
There are a few startups in this space, most notably Worklink but also FieldBit and TeamViewer that help support field workers in enterprise workforces to be more effective and efficient. There’s a growing opportunity for hands-free “augmented support” (perhaps facilitated by flexible camera stands) that wouldn’t require higher-margin headsets to better mobilize best practices and increase caseload throughput for highly teachable (but complex) manual tasks. Industries like car repair, plumbing, and even construction could be interesting beachhead markets here. Most interesting to me is how these technologies can help lower on-boarding and decentralize training costs at large service-oriented companies by moving skill-sets downstream or through these augmented services.
Real Estate and Furniture
The home-buying process has been more or less the same for the past few decades despite being the most expensive purchase that most families and individuals ever make in their lifetime. AR technologies stand to potentially change revolutionize this experience while also providing a sales channel for equally high-margin furniture and interior design companies. Though offered at a premium, companies like Curate are on to something interesting about how to better personalize this very expensive but life-changing process. I wouldn’t be surprised over the next few years if interesting partnerships emerge between forward-thinking real estate and furniture companies to provide augmented reality services that provide more targeted advertising that also broadens the customer funnel upstream.
Retail Discovery
Live location advertising prompts have been around for a while and remain laggards in engaging the everyday consumer. This may be a sign the act of exploring a physical area is not yet mapped to the shopping experience. Large outlet malls may have the most aligned incentives here to retain and engage crowds of shoppers with access and existing mindshare with popular brands. Imagine a more shopping experience that inspires the same sense of discovery as Pokemon Go with finding interesting deals in a store. Main barriers to entry (but also interesting competitive moats) include the same content creation issues that have plagued AR advertising in general.
