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Industry chatter about AR’s world-changing status sometimes outweighs evidence that it’s captivating consumers today. Though we see some signals, such as engagement figures from mobile AR players, we’re often flying blind when it comes to consumer AR sentiment.
Looking to fill that gap, AR Insider’s research arm ARtillery Intelligence asks consumers directly how they feel. Working with consumer survey specialist Thrive Analytics, it wrote questions to be fielded to 50,000+ U.S. adults, and produced a report – now in Wave 9 – based on the results.
Among the topics: How is mobile AR resonating with everyday consumers? How often are they using it? How satisfied are they? What types of experiences do they like most? How much are they willing to pay for it? And for those who aren’t interested in mobile AR….why not?
After the last installment of this series looked at mobile AR’s price sensitivity among users (how much are they willing to pay for it), we now move on to another area of the survey: aspirational experiences. What types of apps and experiences are consumers most interested in?
Aspirational Interest
When looking at AR sentiment – or consumer feelings in any emerging tech – aspirational use cases are a telling sign. For mobile AR, gaming leads (57 percent), followed by social AR (49 percent), city guides (42 percent), visual search (39 percent), and education (35 percent).
Extracting insights from these figures and their trending, a few things jump out at us. For example, after a notable Covid-era drop in interest in-store AR shopping (for logical reasons), it has declined further (for non-logical reasons). This metric never returned to pre-Covid levels.
Meanwhile, there’s growth in home technical support, which lets support reps guide consumers through troubleshooting visually. This has gained traction as consumer-facing brands adopt it and as their customers get acclimated to it. It’s meaningfully better than voice-only support.
Another performant category for aspirational interest was social AR – growing eight percentage points in this survey wave. Its success is because augmentation is naturally conducive to socially-fueled media sharing. It enlivens already-popular behavior, such as sharing selfies.
Business Case
Speaking of big jumps, there’s a multi-wave upward trend in visual search that culminated in a 6-point jump this year. Specifically, 39 percent of survey respondents expressed interest in it, up from 33 percent in the previous survey wave, and 31 percent in the wave before that.
To pause for definitions, visual search includes tools like Google Lens, Ray-Ban Metas, and Apple Intelligence that let users identify and contextualize physical objects. It uses a combination of camera inputs and AI object recognition, meaning that it’s propelled by AI advances.
Visual search is also advantaged by utility, broad applicability, and high frequency. Another traditional format carries these attributes: web search. And like web search, visual search is highly monetizable given high user intent to find out more about things or where to buy them.
That business case drives the efforts of deep-pocketed visual search players noted above. It’s at the heart of Meta’s popular multimodal AI in Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses. And Apple’s Visual Intelligence is a form of visual search. These could explain the jump in interest in this survey wave.
We’ll pause there and pick things up in the next installment with more consumer survey results and insights. Meanwhile, check out the full report here.