About 200 million consumers will have smart glasses, tablets or smartphones with augmented reality (AR) by 2018, new research has suggested.
The study, conducted by analyst firm Juniper Research, said the AR market would evolve to include lifestyle apps that help users with specific tasks from the 60 million consumers using it for games and navigations today.
Research analyst Michael Wiggins told CBR that there was a lot of potential for fitness, cooking and social media apps.
"Because those apps are popular outside AR< they’re likely to be very popular in the future," he said.
"A possible utility in fitness apps is to a see a digital version of yourself or friend running a set rate to see if you can keep up….Future use of AR social media apps could also allow users to bring a person to their physical surrounding through the tablet or smartphones."
Juniper Research added that the tablet would become "a natural environment" for multimedia and second screen apps, while navigation apps would continue to develop on smartphones.
The report said it expects the mobile and smart glasses AR market to be dominated by North America, Western Europe, the Far East and China by 2020, while Japan will be the most valuable market per user download.
