where did consumer AR come from?

AR, for a lot of people, was the buzzword of 2018. the hype around it was crazy. you had mobile ar exploding because of pokemon go and a few more AR games, and funding into AR & subsequently XR hardware was crazy. magic leap raised a record breaking round at the time, vuzix and focals by north were tearing up the space. focals 1 were launched in the same year, so the hype train just stayed on. vuzix had been doing great work in the industry for about a decade then, and focals was the really exciting future prospect. all of this was really really important to offset the negative impression people had of AR after the google glass fiasco of 2013-2014. then in 2020, things changed. yes there was covid, but google bought north right after they announced focals 2. this was a big moment in the then niche AR space, because it showed everyone that google was getting ready to do something big. all that followed was silence (not exactly, you had companies like lumus, ant reality and xreal pop up and show great promise), but this google move didn't do a whole lot.

fast forward to june 2023, and the apple vision pro was announced and AR quietly started becoming a buzzword again (even though the avp is technically simulated passthrough, so by definition it's a VR headset). the hype was coming back. and then people finished the 3 minute launch video and saw the price of the avp. that killed the hype again. even google announced it was shutting down project iris, it's AR glasses project. however, people started showing faith in the idea of mixed reality. following this uptick in popularity, you had more huge companies announce demo units of their ar hardware products. oppo came out with the 3rd iteration demo unit of their AR glasses, brilliant labs announced a $3 million funding round, and xreal, rokid, inmo, viture and a few other companies kept going at it. may 2024 even saw google come back in the game, after soft launching it's AR glasses as a part of their project astra presentation during google i/o 2024.

then september 2024 saw arguably the most insane month for AR yet. snapchat launched the spectacles 3 on the 17th, meta launched the orion demo on the 25th (and we demoed our first prototype on the 21st). all of this meant heads were not only turning, but actively searching for AR.

these 3 events in the last year, the launch of the apple vision pro, the snapchat spectacles and the meta orion demo bring us to today.

AR+AI is the biggest hardware+software "technology of the future" collaboration right now. and that's where we come in.

where are we going?

the following is my take on the future of this industry. the views here are my own.

by 2027, the technology will get mass produceable at a price that most people can afford, a form factor that most people can comfortably wear and use cases that most people can extract value from. this mass adoption will start here, in india by 2029. the obsolescence of phones, however, will take longer. i feel eventually, the tech will become so easily integrable, that you won't think about buying just a confined screen anymore. the relationship between ar glasses, phones, laptops and tvs is going to be very very interesting to study in the future. a very vocal majority on the internet believed that the smartphone would replace the laptop, yet here we are. i do truly believe that ar will replace phones. we can't predict how tech is used. all we can do is make it capable enough to be used. the best use cases will be created by users.