Smart Glasses: The Road to AR’s Holy Grail

Augmented reality’s traction over the past few years has occurred mostly through the smartphone camera. As we quantified in our recent mobile AR revenue forecast, this early AR modality has reached scale by piggy-backing on a ubiquitous device we all carry.
But that scale has a tradeoff. Mobile AR’s quantitative benefits come with qualitative detriments. In other words, though AR benefits from mobile’s sheer reach, smartphones aren’t the technology’s optimal vessel. There, AR is overshadowed by other established and primary smartphone activities.
Beyond taking a back seat to other mobile use cases, AR’s use on smartphones can be awkward and un-ergonomic. Arm fatigue sets in through the act of holding one’s phone up for long periods to experience line-of-sight graphical overlays. This keeps session lengths short.
Put another way, AR is a bolted-on technology for the smartphone, rather than a native one. A device that has an inherently downward-held orientation wasn’t made for a technology that integrates graphics with line-of-sight perspectives. The result: AR’s smartphone activations are relatively unnatural.
“Relatively” is the key word, as mobile AR has seen some success, such as Snapchat lenses. But to achieve “native” orientation, AR’s true home awaits in glasses form. AR’s potential and its consumer appeal won’t be fully unlocked until it can realistically be housed in wearable eyeglasses.
But that’s easier said than done. The underlying technology isn’t yet at the stage where graphically-robust experiences can be integrated with glasses that most average consumers will wear. Conversely, stylistically-viable smart glasses can’t have the graphical intensity for a worthwhile user experience.
This is a design tradeoff that AR glasses hopefuls continue to grapple with. At one end of the spectrum are AR headsets like Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap One – graphically compelling but stylistically untenable. At the other end is hardware such as North Focals – sleek but underwhelming in graphical intensity.
Until the day when these factors can co-exist, tradeoffs will continue to be made, where individual use cases (think enterprise vs. consumer) determine the optimal target along that sliding scale. Meanwhile, the mutual exclusivity of these design endpoints keeps AR glasses in early-adopter phases.
What will it take to get over that hump and bring AR glasses to the mainstream? Will Apple’s rumored glasses accomplish this? And how many years will this evolutionary process take? We’ll answer these questions and others in this report through numbers and narratives.
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This report highlights ARtillery’s Intelligence viewpoints, gathered from its daily in-depth coverage of spatial computing. To support the narrative, data are cited throughout the report. These include ARtillery Intelligence’s original data, as well as that of third parties. Data sources are attributed in each case.
For market sizing and forecasting, ARtillery Intelligence follows disciplined best practices, developed and reinforced through its principles’ 15 years in tech sector research and intelligence. This includes the past 4 years covering AR & VR exclusively, as seen in research reports and daily reporting.
Furthermore, devising these figures involves the “bottom-up” market-sizing methodology, which involves granular ad revenue dynamics such as campaign pricing and spending. More about ARtillery Intelligence methodology can be seen here, and market-sizing credentials can be seen here.


ARtillery Intelligence has no financial stake in the companies mentioned in this report, nor received payment for its production. With respect to market sizing, ARtillery Intelligence remains independent of players and practitioners in the sectors it covers, thus mitigating bias in industry revenue calculations and projections. Disclosure and ethics policy can be seen in full here.
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As we approach the turn of a new year, it’s once again time for our annual ritual of synthesizing the lessons from the past twelve months and formulating the outlook for the next twelve. Notably, when kicking off this thought exercise, we realized that several of the topics look similar to last year.






Like many research & intelligence firms, one of the things that ARtillery Intelligence does is 



A common AR industry sentiment is that the smartphone is the device that will pave the way for smart glasses. The thought is that before AR glasses achieve consumer-friendly specs and price points, AR’s delivery system is the device we all have in our pockets. There, it can seed user demand for AR and get developers to start thinking spatially.




Like many research & intelligence firms, one of the things that ARtillery Intelligence does is market sizing. A few times per year, we go into isolation and bury ourselves deep in financial modeling. This takes the insights and observations we accumulate throughout the year and synthesizes them into hard numbers for the current and future spatial computing industry (methodology details here).



Augmented reality continues to evolve and take shape as an industry. Like other tech sectors, it has spawned several sub-segments that comprise an ecosystem. These each represent standalone topics in ARtillery Intelligence’s ongoing analysis, including monthly Intelligence Briefings like this.




Like many research & intelligence firms, one of the things that ARtillery Intelligence does is market sizing. A few times per year, we go into isolation and bury ourselves in deep financial modeling. This takes the insights and observations we accumulate throughout the year and synthesizes them into hard numbers for the current and future spatial computing industry (methodology details here).



Augmented reality continues to evolve and take shape as an industry. Like other tech sectors, it has spawned several sub-sectors that comprise an ecosystem. These segments represent standalone topics in ARtillery Intelligence’s ongoing analysis, including monthly Intelligence Briefings like this.




How do consumers feel about mobile AR? Who’s using it? How often? And what do they want to see next? Perhaps more importantly, what are non-users’ reasons for disinterest? And how can app developers and anyone else building mobile AR apps optimize product strategies accordingly?






How do consumers feel about VR? Who’s using it? What devices and apps do they prefer? And what do they want to see next? Perhaps more important, what are non-users’ reasons for disinterest? And how can VR software developers and hardware players optimize product strategies accordingly?



