The building blocks of better AR/VR at Augmented World Expo
An article on Venture Beat by Dean Takahashi walks through AR VR at AWE 2019 and reveals how the enterprise is where the growth is.
The author remarks he was happy to see some of that potential as the show at the Santa Clara Convention Center was bigger than ever. Enterprises are beginning to adopt and embrace these technologies, as I saw with Volvo’s investment in AR/VR headset maker Varjo.
Takahashi met with Jim Heppelmann, CEO of PTC, the provider of the AR platform Vuforia, at AWE. He said his company’s AR revenues are about 7% of the total, and it’s growing about 90 percent a year, thanks to enterprise AR adoption for things like training and field work. That growth rate is enough to deliver 6% growth per year to the larger corporation, and it is enough to keep investing in AR.
If big companies like PTC and their big customers in the enterprise carry the torch, then we will see a market for things like Varjo’s amazing XR-1 AR technology, which the company is trying to polish so that an AR headset can be worn while driving a car. The resolution of the headset displays is much better than what is in the market today in the form of Oculus or HTC Vive VR headsets. It has two 12-megapixel cameras that can create images with a resolution of more than 4K per eye.
An enterprise might pay something like $6,000 for this kind of tech. But you can’t sell it to consumers until it costs $300. It takes a lot of spins of Moore’s Law to get to that lower cost.
A lot of companies are pivoting right now, leaving the consumer AR and VR markets and moving into enterprise, location-based entertainment, and the health, education, and industrial markets.
Once you have the graphics, you need the haptics (the sense of touch), said Nicole Lazzaro, head of XEO Design and a VR game designer.
Further comments and the full article can be read here.