What does the future hold for augmented reality?

According to Digi-Capital, it is predicted that AR will be a $90 billion business by 2020. Goldman Sachs predicts that AR will generate $80 billion by 2025, with $35 billion of that from software alone. The healthcare field is projected to produce $5.1 billion in revenue, engineering is estimated to produce $4.7 billion, real estate will produce $2.6 billion in revenue, retail will generate $1.6 billion in revenue, and education will generate $700 million in revenue. [24]

Augmented reality is being piloted in medical and surgical areas and offers great improvement in the field. Most people outside of the medical field would not even know the advancements that have been made because of augmented reality since it happens behind the scenes. [12]

Advancements in technology are producing better software and hardware for AR applications. Displays like glasses or contact lenses are becoming lighter. User experience is going through changes and will eventually adapt to allow users to control their environment in realtime without the use of physical buttons or controllers, but instead use virtual buttons to control their interactions. Technology becomes less expensive, faster, and greater every year thus enabling sensing, tracking, processing, and displaying to advance as well. The advancements in mobile phone technology will provide an even better avenue for AR applications. Processing speed will increase, graphics will become better, power consumption will decrease, battery life will increase, network connections will become faster, and displays will become clearer and better. Tracking will improve allowing users to not only rely on geographic location and landmark distance to make the application function. [12]

Since the field of augmented reality is changing at a rapid pace, developers should not only be producing applications relavent for today, but expanding and designing applications for the future. Application developers should keep up with current and future hardware and software developments to stay ahead of the curve on AR developemnt. AR application designers should focus on creating content that is easily adaptable for users and devices for maximum usability. Augmented has the potential to become part of everyone's daily life. Content development is a major piece of the puzzle that still requires some work. It's of the school of "if you build it, they will come." The perfect AR application still needs to be developed to bring in the masses. AR applications will become multi-user and even incorporate more of our senses than just sight, but also touch, taste, and smell. Other areas are being studied like applications involving "emotional senses" like empathy and self-realization. [12] There will probably be a time when virtual reality and augmented reality will merge to utilize the best that both worlds have to offer. The user could even select the level of both VR and AR that they want to use. [22]