Digital Trends to Watch Out for in 2019
As Australia’s premiere digital marketing agency for all things tech and blockchain, we keep all of our many (and diverse!) fingers on the digital pulse. We’re on a constant journey to immerse ourselves in the question “what’s coming next?”, and below are some of our favourite trends we think we’ll see in 2019 and onwards.
Augmented Reality (AR)
When the first Oculus Rift VR kits were shipped in 2013, it was lauded as a game-changing idea–we were just a few years off from totally immersive experiences. We were approaching the future, right beside hover cars and the Jetsons.
Unfortunately, things haven’t panned out for VR in quite the way that everyone expected. In 2015, Business Insider was among the many excited parties that extrapolated the ‘explosion’ in VR growth to a 99% Compound Annual Growth Rate until 2020–in 2018, that expected rate dropped to just 23%.
Although VR has been plagued by high-cost headsets, motion-sickness and an ongoing diagnosis of “just come back in 5 years”, VR’s simpler and more cost-effective twin AR has really showcased its potential with smart, cheap and best of all widely adopted use-cases– PokemonGo!, anyone?
The AR market is growing at a much faster rate than VR — thanks G2Crowd
In 2018, AR found multiple niches across many different industries, infiltrating retail with IKEA Place’s ability to show you how furniture would appear in your home and improving social media with custom facial-mapping filters from Snapchat and Instagram (Hey, we make AR filters too!).
One of the AR applications that excites us the most is in digital marketing. Savvy products have begun to cotton on that consumers love augmented reality, and the possibilities for marketing within an AR experience are endless. One of our favourite examples of this (full disclosure: we’re working with them on their marketing and application development) is Zukaz, who are enabling local businesses to drop vouchers in AR-space for consumers to ‘hunt’ down in real life.
Maybe we’ll see blade-runner style holo-adverts popping up on our phones sometime in 2019–who knows? Regardless, we’re sure the coming year will be big for AR.
