According to a recent survey, AR users like what they see, with a whopping 73% reporting high or very high satisfaction. But non-users report explicit disinterest, with the biggest reason being the rather daunting “just not interested.” This presents a big hill for AR app developers to climb.
Visual AR won’t go away and is aligned with several use cases like gaming. But audio could get here sooner and take over a certain share of micro moments like getting informed about people or surroundings. We’re talking local discovery, shopping, and proximity-based social media.
What about the non-Googles of the world? How will they create AR and visual search apps that can map environments reliably and return the correct info or graphics? The answer is the still-theoretical but critical AR Cloud.
In these early days of augmented reality (AR), we’re learning a lot about consumer behavior and preferences — the same learning curve defined the early days of smartphone apps. One lesson so far is that consumer AR use cases will be fairly limited. It’s not a silver bullet and it’s not for everyone.
SMB OS isn’t a new concept, though it’s now emerging and crystallizing in new ways. Advancing it are supporting technologies like cloud computing, mobility and cash-flow friendly SaaS pricing. Much of this trickles down from enterprise world, as it often does.
Voice assistants continue to evolve as a medium for local search, as I examined here last month. But what does it mean for local media players and startups? If consumers are increasingly searching with voice, how do you wedge your way into that conversation?
It’s often said in the ad-tech world, and other sectors that are reliant on data, that “Content is King, but Data is God.” This is increasingly true in local ad-tech and martech given the need for “ground-truth” conversions to attribute ROI. And it will equally apply in local AR.
Local advertising is a $150 billion market, and is particularly conducive to AR, given the technology’s ability to qualify purchase decisions in the commerce-heavy offline world. There will be a land grab for this digital real estate as mobile AR gains consumer traction. There will be also questions about who “owns” that virtual space.
Voice search and AI are widely misunderstood. Generalist tech coverage has painted the picture of an opportunity that resides mostly with stationary devices like Amazon Echo. But the real scale will happen elsewhere.
Though still nascent, visual search builds on a few key trends. Smartphones have increasingly powerful optics; AI and machine learning support computer vision to identify items; and there’s behavioral alignment with millennials who use the smartphone camera as a communication tool.
It’s important to step back and look at the reality of consumer adoption of VR. The technology is pretty nascent and future-looking — but to what degree? That question can partly be answered by original data on consumer VR behavior and sentiments.
There are lots of ways that augmented reality (AR) is a natural fit for local commerce. But questions remain: How will AR will materialize in local? How long it will take? And how do these factors signal local startups and media companies where to place their chips?
How will advertising play out in (admittedly nascent) VR, especially in local? We’ll likely see the same early and ongoing misfires, such as banner ads. Or, as in video experiences, we’ll likely see a fair share of legacy formats — like pre-roll ads — ham-handedly shoehorned into VR.