Is 2018 the Year for AR Wearables?
Magic Leap, the stealthy augmented-reality startup that raised almost $2 billion in funding, finally revealed the Magic Leap One last week, which will launch in 2018. It will offer holograms that persist, spatial audio, a controller with six degrees of freedom, and inputs with voice, gesture, head pose, and eye tracking. It will be a worthy competitor to the Microsoft Hololens.
Impressive stuff, but there’s still one unknown factor: price. With all of the features that the Magic Leap One will offer as a first generation device, my guess is that it will be in the range of $1,500 (Google Glass) to $3,000 (Microsoft HoloLens). I do not see huge adoption for AR wearables in 2018 largely due to this price tag. However, there is one device that will be critical for the adoption of AR, a device that many people already have.
The smartphone.
AR Development Kits
The release of iOS 11 on September 19th introduced ARKit, a framework for developing AR experiences for the iPhone 6S and above. Google also recently introduced ARCore, bringing AR to selected Android devices.
Within a few months, some impressive AR functionalities have already been developed:
- Amazon AR View allows you to view products in your home before buying them
- Similarly, IKEA Place allows you to preview IKEA products in your home
- ARKit + CoreLocation provides turn-by-turn directions with holograms
- Pokemon GO AR+ places Pokémon in a fixed point in space, which makes them get smaller as you walk away, and bigger as you approach them
- ARKit + Matterport offers immersive 3D virtual tours of planes that cannot be physically accessed at the Museum of Flight
These experiences are not as great as the ones offered by the HoloLens or the soon-to-be released Magic Leap One, and may be awkward to use, but they are currently the most accessible. Many of us already have smartphones in our pockets, so there’s no need to go out and spend a significant amount of money on a device that is clunky and fragile.
Smartphones Continue to Evolve
The iPhone 8 released last September was the first iPhone created with AR in mind with its specially calibrated cameras, new gyro and accelerometer, improved CPU for world tracking, and improved GPU for rendering graphics. The iPhone X also feature these same specs, with the addition of other improvements. With over 223 million iPhone sold in 2017 alone, it places AR in the hands of an audience that the HoloLens, Magic Leap One, and other AR devices will not reach for many years. As more people continue to buy a new iPhone in 2018, this number will keep growing.
Let’s not forget about the Android ecosystem. While Android dominates the global market share for smartphones, ARCore currently only supports the Google Pixel, Google Pixel 2, and Samsung Galaxy S8, with plans to support the S8+ and Note 8 in the near future. Only 33 million units of the S8 and Note 8 were sold in 2017, but I am confident that ARCore will support more Android devices in 2018 as they get refreshed with improved internals.
The Future of AR
I do believe that people will eventually use AR wearables as much as they use their smartphones (with the smartphone eventually being replaced), but there’s still much work to be done. These dedicated AR devices must become smaller, cheaper, and more powerful. Until then, smartphones will play a key role in the rise of AR wearables once more people start to see the value that AR will add to their lives.
