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Juniper Predicts Massive 5-Year Growth For Mixed Reality

According to a new study released by Juniper Research, enterprise mixed reality (MR) implementations are set to see a growth of around 500-percent over the next five years. That’s according to the aptly titled “Enterprise Mixed Reality Applications To Approach 40 Million By 2022, As App Revenues Near $6 Billion,” which was published by the organization on May 14. For those who may not be aware, MR applications are those that allow for real-time interaction with VR and AR blended content and the figure equates to around 40 million enterprise-level MR applications by 2022. What’s more, Juniper Research predicts a subscription-based model to dominate that landscape. Finally, Smart Glasses may finally break into the consumer market driven by MR gaming and advancements in the technology which finally make products appealing to potential buyers.

The growth is expected to hinge mostly on the scalability associated with subscription-based sales. That scalability is estimated to drive around 97-percent of the expected $6 billion app revenue in the enterprise space by 2022. In fact, the research firm suggests that APIs and hardware should be offered on those types of models in order to prevent potential customers from being priced out. That makes sense since it allows enterprise customers to pay for what they need, rather than buying prepackaged bundles that don’t necessarily fit requirements. In particular, MR provides such a wide range of possibilities in an enterprise space – ranging from inventory management to augmenting decision making for leadership. So those businesses buying into the technology will want to be able to adjust what is or is not included to suit their individual needs.

Simultaneously, Juniper Research also expects that the Smart Glasses category might be due a comeback. That will, the firm says, be driven primarily by games and education uses for the technology – which also centers around use in MR applications. Although Juniper doesn’t provide any education figures, games will account for more than 40-percent of consumer MR app revenues, according to current forecasts. That’s a substantial amount of growth for the five-year period, as well. However, on this technology, Juniper makes it clear that nothing is set in stone. Improvements are needed nearly across the board in order to spur mass adoption. Those include advancements in the field-of-view smart glasses can operate with, the weight of the products, and a requirement for much better optimizations for battery life and performance. It’s something that some companies are working on but which hasn’t necessarily been mastered but it will need to be for smart glasses to hit the predicted 11 million apps figure by 2022. Finally, Juniper says that could be helped along via the use of Android OS, rather than proprietary operating systems. It goes without saying that would make creating new experiences a much less daunting prospect for developers since it would narrow scope of app development to a single OS.