AR VR for Business Adoption Goes Through Mobile
Mobile devices are massively adopted today and Augmented and Virtual reality technologies are available through solid SDKs like ARKit, ARCore, Unity, Unreal Engine and more. Having said that, it is only logical to make the conclusion that the massive adoption of AR VR for business applications will inevitably go through Mobile, prior to any dedicated hardware like Microsoft HoloLens, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Google Glass and other.
Let’s dig into some more data to validate this conclusion.
Mobile Device Adoption
The world has more mobile phone subscriptions than people, according to the International Telecommunications Union’s Facts and Figures for 2017.
According to Business Insider, the number of smartphone devices worldwide in 2016 is about 1.7 billion, estimated to steadily grow to more than 2 billion by 2020.
Every single Android and iOS smartphone device is AR-enabled by its camera and ARCore/ARKit. It can be also easily and cheaply turned into a VR-ready device by simple add-on lenses — like this beauty for example:
In other words, we are referring to 1.7 billion AR VR ready devices, existing today, not in the future. The good news is that these devices are stand-alone, require no additional hardware to work (well, except the lenses for VR), they are mobile and their owners carry them everywhere.
Mobile AR VR Adoption
According to Digi Capital, the total AR install base could reach 3.5 billion install base in 5 years, of which 90+ percent belong to Mobile AR:
In other words, unless some revolutionary stand-alone device gets invented, AR VR adoption will go through mobile in terms of install base and reach to end users.
Mobile AR VR for Business
The challenge is to demonstrate to businesses the value of AR VR in solving business problems more efficiently that conventional solutions that exist today. In an early market we can only sell complete solutions, not vision and/or tooling. Businesses will inevitably fail to imagine the value of AR VR unless they see it in action. And by “see it in action” I mean a complete working application, not slides and images.
We can approach a potential customer with a working application in two ways:
- By carrying the $3000 HoloLens device and do the demo
- By simply asking the customer to download a mobile application from the store on their smartphone and demo it
Obviously, Mobile AR VR provides the fastest path to reach out to a potential customer and do a demo. It is the preferred one as it requires little to no investment in terms of hardware — it is already there. Burdening the business decision maker thinking with a solid initial investment of $3000 per single HoloLens device immediately puts pessimistic flavor in the overall conversation and the value that we try to demonstrate has reduced probability to be seen/understood. At a later stage it may turn that stand-alone AR VR devices are better fit for a particular problem, but this can only happen when the initial value proposition is sold to the business owner.
As I pointed out in my previous post, the top three reasons that prevent people from doing AR VR business application development today are
- I see no value in AR VR for solving my problems
- I have no business requirement to do such applications
- HoloLens device is too expensive
Mobile AR VR can definitely be the answer to these reasons and can help people invent bold ideas more rapidly.
Conclusion
If you have an idea how AR VR can solve a business problem I would recommend going mobile first during the validation phase. This will give you better exposure and remove the hardware entry barrier in business conversations.
At Progress Telerik we will be taking the same approach and everything that we build will be mobile-first. Being based on Unity3D, it is literally trivial to expose what we have today to Mobile. If you know C# and .NET, Unity3D is the only reasonable choice — it is truly cross-platform and produces high-quality 3D experiences.
Thanks for reading and good luck with your experiments. Comments and thoughts are more than welcome :)
