It’s been estimated by Favro that close to a third (60 percent) of organizations’ teams are not using agile methodologies, despite considerable growth in the augmented reality market being forecast. This makes it near impossible for many companies to quickly pivot in a space that requires a trial and error approach.
To understand the complexities for businesses in terms of implementing augmented reality, Digital Journal caught up with Patric Palm, co-founder of Favro. Favro is a project management solution used among developers.
Digital Journal: What’s in store for augmented reality in 2018?
Patric Palm: With 2017 being the experimentation era of augmented reality, 2018 will produce some AR hits. With the release of ARKit, ARCore and ARStudio, we’ll start seeing more AR applications in development — but these platforms are still very new. That said, there probably won’t be a big AR breakthrough until 2019, when the technology becomes mainstream.
Here are three predictions for AR in the coming year. First, one of 2018’s AR hits will be Niantic’s Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. The highly-anticipated game has potential to be even bigger than Pokémon GO, considering people are now more aware of AR and have more powerful phones. Most importantly, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite will have a huge mainstream impact in 2018.
Second, we will see more AR shopping experiences. IKEA is already well into the AR shopping arena, with the launch of IKEA Place. I expect more retailers will follow suit this year given that AR applications for shopping are relatively easy to develop.
Third, we’re going to see a ridiculous amount of AR face mask applications. Due to the popularity of face masks on Snapchat and Instagram stories, more organizations will attempt to imitate the function.
DJ: Which types of businesses should AR be appealing to?
Palm: AR should be appealing to businesses in the games, e-commerce and furniture/interior industries. Eventually, we will see AR take off in the fashion industry. However, this may not happen until 2019 as the AR for fashion more technically challenging.
DJ: Are new open development platforms helping to invigorate the AR space?
Palm: Yes, absolutely. Open development platforms are actually democratizing augmented reality, making the technology more accessible than ever. Open development platforms are doing for AR what Unity has done for game development.
DJ: How equipped are organizations to take advantage of augmented reality?
Palm: From a development point of view, organizations are pretty well equipped to take advantage of augmented reality. However, on the creative side, it’s going to take a bit more time to create unique AR experiences. In other words, AR is becoming less of a technical challenge and more of a creative challenge. The problem is that ideas are easier to imitate than to create. So, it will take time for creative teams to find the next big thing that isn’t just face masks.
DJ: What is holding back businesses from adopting AR?
Palm: Imagination is what’s holding businesses back from adopting AR. That is why it’s so important that organizations push a few AR hits into the market. Then, other organizations can understand how to deploy these AR experiences and adopt the technology themselves. Again, the challenge here is creating a unique experience that’s never been made before.
DJ: How can Favro help in terms of the services you offer?
Palm: This whole area of augmented reality is unknown. There’s so much to discover with the technology — and that can only be done by organizations that are hyper-adaptable, or Agile. Favro does Agile-at-Scale not only on the development side, but for other teams as well. And it’s no surprise that many game development studios are already using Favro for AR development. These are the people that are already on the technology’s frontier, and they also tend to be more progressive in their thinking.
