Juniper Research: Smart Glasses a Niche Product
A new report from Juniper Research paints a less-than-rosy outlook for the smart glasses industry, including Google Glass.
The report, Smart Glasses: Consumer, Enterprise and Healthcare Strategies and Forecasts 2014-2019, runs close to 70 pages and concludes that shipments of smart glasses won’t reach 10 million units per year until 2018.
“A combination of lengthy time-to-market and lack of a key consumer use case has resulted in low levels of shipments and adoption in the smart glasses space,” Juniper says in a news release. Also hurting growth of the smart glass space is what Juniper calls the “slow path to social acceptance.”
The report also found that smart glasses continue to raise privacy and safety concerns from many consumers and government bodies. It argued that these need to be addressed or assuaged before the devices become accepted, although prices and their status as supplementary devices mean that smart glasses will remain niche for the medium-term.
While smart glasses may be missing a “key consumer use case,” Juniper believes business uses — particularly in healthcare — will help Google Glass and its competitors start to gain a foothold.
If so, that mirrors the development of the smartphone space. Blackberries and similar devices were popular first in business and industry in the early 2000s, and it wasn’t really until the iPhone launched in 2007 that consumer adoption of smartphones took off. (In fact, it wasn’t really until the second iPhone that this happened.)