Enterprise AR will follow these 3 paths in 2021
An article on VentureBeat offers a detailed look at what 2021 migth herald for Enterprise AR looking at Growing leadership and organization-wide comfort with AR concepts, Increased conversion of physical assets into digital assets for AR and Continued improvements in enterprise AR hardware.
Thanks largely to the COVID-19 pandemic, digital collaboration tools became critically important to enterprises and small businesses in 2020, with multi-person video chats and team messaging apps becoming mandatory as offices moved to remote work, says an article on VentureBeat. Less conspicuously, augmented reality technologies gained traction this year within certain industries, enabling people to “see” digital people, objects, and data as holograms within different spaces; AR allows five co-workers in separate home offices to collaboratively refine a photorealistic 3D backpack design, or sit at a common table in a virtual space for a group discussion.
As 2020 comes to a close, it’s clear that AR took only half steps towards the goalposts I laid out one year ago: Yes, new hardware, software, and wireless technologies reached enterprise audiences this year, but COVID-19 cast a dark cloud over everything, contributing at least somewhat to the predicted thinning of the AR herd without dramatically changing the list of players. What should have been a global rollout of Nreal’s Light AR glasses instead became only regional, 5G and Wi-Fi 6 became more widespread but not ubiquitous, and compelling apps designed for AR headsets began to chase larger markets of VR and mobile device users to build larger user bases.
Even so, the latest enterprise augmented reality trends are significant to technical decision makers because AR will increasingly provide organizations with tools to collaborate from multiple locations, visualize information, and share digital products with both internal and external audiences. Taking COVID-19’s continued impacts into account, here are three enterprise AR trends that are likely to be important in 2021, regardless of whether the virus keeps most people out of traditional offices throughout the coming year.
- Growing leadership and organization-wide comfort with AR concepts
- Increased conversion of physical assets into digital assets for AR
- Continued improvements in enterprise AR hardware
Read about all 3 above points in detail on VentureBeat