ABI Research has announced it is adding 40 new companies to its augmented and mixed reality ecosystem tracker. A quarter of these new companies are from China, owing to the significant growth witnessed in the country.
Marina Lu, Senior Analyst at ABI Research commented:
“North America dominates the AR market with the leading technologies, accounting for the largest share in terms of total market revenues. Asia Pacific is the second largest market with fast growth, thanks to its population, economic growth, and increasing adoption of new technologies.
China leads Asia Pacific in AR and MR usage, attaching significant importance to gaming, education, and real estate. China’s massive mobile internet population provides a huge market for AR content consumption, which brings great opportunity for China search engine giant Baidu to entrench itself in smartphone-based AR. Another two dominant Chinese Internet giants, Tencent (social) and Alibaba (e-commerce), have also started investing in mobile AR”.
Apple and Google have taken great strides to pave the way for augmented reality, with their ARKit and ARCore platforms. Apple has also recently purchased eye-tracking firm SensorMotoric Instruments, while Google picked up its own eye-tracking start-up, Eyefluence.
ABI noted head-mounted device manufacturer RealWear and display manufacturer WaveOptics as two new contenders in the AR/MR market. Eric Abbruzzese, Principal Analyst at ABI said:
“Continued AR development from Apple and Google will bridge the gap between enterprise and consumer in a way that has not yet been seen in the industry. ARKit reaching all iOS 11 devices is already a massive install base, and the addition of more Android devices over time through ARCore will create a total addressable hardware base of over a billion devices in a very short amount of time.
This compounds on the promising smart glasses market taking root in the enterprise, with increased efficiency and safety drawing commercial customers to AR and MR devices”.
