Research suggests that Mixed Reality apps are due for a huge boom within the next four years, and that the number of available applications in this category for various platforms will grow to an increased number that goes beyond that of nine billion. This is suspected to happen by 2022, and would be a fairly large bump up from the number of apps that are considered to be Mixed Reality that are available right now, which is said to currently be around three billion.
As far as increases go, that’s a jump of over 200-percent, 212-percent to be exact. What’s more is that in the same year, the value of MR games is expected to see a huge increase as well moving up to a total valuation of $2.3 billion, while the number of social media applications with features and services rooted in Mixed Reality will be expected to exceed six billion with 98-percent of app revenues in the same year coming from ads. Though it’s not likely that the uptick in Mixed Reality apps over the next four years will be entirely a direct result of the popularity of mobile AR games, the research highlights the global popularity of titles like Pokemon GO while stating that it and similar titles have served some contribution to the continued rise in popularity for this category of apps as a whole.
While games like Pokemon GO may have helped to increase the popularity of Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality and assist in the drive forward with more apps and games that will feature a base of this technology, Google, Facebook, and even Apple are suggested to be three large driving forces in the future of MR app development. On a slightly unrelated note but still within the same research, digital assistants like Google Assistant and Alexa may very well end up being the most used form of user input.