by 
As we approach a new year, it’s time for our annual ritual of synthesizing the lessons from the past twelve months and formulating the outlook for the next twelve. 2024 was an incremental year for AR & VR, which both continue to gradually trudge uphill toward mainstream traction.
Highlights this year include XR’s initial convergence with AI, Apple Vision Pro’s slow traction, and some ups and downs for VR. 2024 was also defined by the rise of low-immersion smart glasses, and aspirational high-immersion AR glasses like Snap Spectacles and Meta Orion.
All these approaches – passthrough AR, seethrough AR, and non-display smart glasses – represent a divergence and diversification of form factors. That’s a good thing, as XR should include several formats that are purpose-built and use-case-driven – a key trend seen this year.
With that backdrop, what will 2025 look like in spatial computing? Aligned with the more extensive predictions of our research arm, ARtillery Intelligence, we’ve devised 5 predictions. We’ll break them down weekly, continuing here with prediction 5: Visual Search’s Mainstream Move.
Prediction 1: AR & AI Collide
Prediction 2: XR Form Factors Diverge & Diversify
Prediction 3: Meta Orion Inspires Seethrough AR
Prediction 4: Mixed Reality Development Amps Up
Prediction 5: Visual Search’s Mainstream Move
Doubling Down
As one flavor or AR, visual search annotates the world with informational overlays to contextualize physical objects. Shown by Google Lens and Snap Scan, use cases include local discovery (identifying storefronts), education (plants & animals), and shopping (fashion items).
Altogether, it’s a utility with sustainable value and potential high-frequency usage – just like web search. And it’s naturally monetizable given users’ intent signaling with every visual search… again, just like web search). That’s why Google is keen to invest in and incubate it.
So if all that is true, why hasn’t visual search reached its potential? One answer is that it’s doing just fine… albeit quietly. Google has revealed that Lens sees more than 10 billion visual searches per month. But its potential is much greater as this is a small fraction of web search.
The reason it hasn’t reached that potential is something we call activation energy. Visual search’s primary vessel is the smartphone, so it requires holding up your phone and performing several finger taps to open the right app. But it needs to be frictionless to gain mass adoption.
Handheld vs. Headworn
We believe that point will come when visual search is head-worn in addition to handheld. When it reaches that stage, it will be ambient and automatic within one’s line of sight. We’re already seeing this play out in Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses (RBMS), giving visual search a bit of an inflection.
Specifically, multimodal AI is one of the central selling points in the runaway-hit RBMS. An advanced form of visual search, this lets users search with the camera plus spoken refinements (e.g., “What am I looking at?”). This puts even more utility and functionality behind visual search.
Beyond Meta’s work to accelerate visual search adoption, something unexpected happened recently from another tech giant: Apple’s “Camera Control” button on the iPhone 16 now has the option to launch visual searches, thus mitigating the “activation energy” noted earlier.
As background, the Camera Control button is a dedicated button to capture photos faster than swiping and tapping on previous iPhones. The presence of this dedicated button – on such a ubiquitous device as the iPhone – could give visual search the mainstream exposure that it needs.
Concrete Prediction
Given that the driving factors noted – RBMS and iPhone 16 – require more time to penetrate consumer markets, visual search’s near-term growth will be relatively small but meaningful. To quantify that, we project visual search monthly aggregate query volume to reach 15 billion in 2025.
We’ll pause there and circle back next week with more 2025 insights and outlook. Meanwhile, check out the full report.
More from AR Insider…
