Will Silicon Valley giants' enthusiasm for AR eliminate mobile phones in the future?

“If you take away one thing today,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in April at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference, “it’s this: We’re turning the smartphone camera into the first augmented reality platform.”

Facebook has begun adding camera effects to its apps, allowing users to overlay objects, animations, and filters on their photos—yes, a clear rip-off of Snapchat’s popular AR filters. By creating a new open platform that lets developers create their own special effects, artistic effects, and 3D games, Facebook is betting it can become the go-to platform for AR experiences, surfacing third-party apps within its own apps the way WeChat does.

After years of silence, the augmented reality boom is heating up. In addition to Facebook’s augmented reality ambitions (which will also launch a wearable device in the future), there are also Google’s four-year-old Google Glass, Microsoft’s HoloLens, the mysterious product of the heavily funded Magic Leap—and the rumored Apple AR product. According to market research firm CB Insights, a total of 49 companies have reached equity financing transactions since last spring—a number that is 75% higher than the previous 12 months.

These companies are trying to dominate the future: in the future, the boundaries between the physical world and the digital world will become increasingly blurred, and you won’t even need a keyboard or touch screen to operate. “Augmented reality is the next mobile computer, the next operating system, and the next social platform.” Ori Inbar, founder of Super Ventures, a venture capital firm focusing on AR, said, “The smartphone is dead; people just haven’t realized it yet.”

Is this true? What will AR look like in the future? Let’s look at it from three perspectives:

Our phones will be the gateway (for now)

For much of the past decade, developers have been promising to use smartphone cameras to give us a better view of the world. In 2009, consumer review site Yelp launched Monocle, which let users view reviews of local businesses through their camera lens; it inspired a slew of copycat apps, none of which took off. Monocle became popular with millennials, pushing the technology into the mainstream, leading to Snapchat’s addictive selfie filters in September 2015. Last August, Pokémon Go reached 100 million downloads, and people around the world took their smartphones outside to catch Pokémon.

Replacing your nose with a dog’s in a photo or catching Pokémon outside your favorite coffee shop may seem silly, but it can actually be profound — a smart way to engage consumers with augmented reality. With its sponsored lenses, Snapchat now has a promising advertising platform. The feature can be limited to specific locations. Niantic, the creator of Pokémon Go, created a global hit that has generated estimated revenues of more than $1 billion. Developers are now scrambling to create the next big AR app — from multiplayer games to more practical apps like interactive travel guides and shopping assistants. Their success may ultimately depend on a key element that Snapchat and Niantic have revealed: providing socially interactive experiences based on advanced location intelligence.

Meanwhile, smartphones are becoming more advanced. Since 2014, Google has been working on its Tango platform, which aims to bring spatial awareness to mobile devices. Late last year, Lenovo launched the $500 Phab 2 Pro, the first Tango-enabled smartphone. The phone uses multiple cameras and advanced motion-tracking sensors to create a 3D map from a two-dimensional image. Take a photo of your living room with the Phab 2 Pro’s camera, and Tango will know that the lamp is six feet to the left of the sofa. Then, you can use the Tango-optimized app from the e-commerce giant Wayfair to see what a (virtual) coffee table would look like between the sofa and the lamp. Lowe’s, the home improvement chain, has a similar app, as well as one that lets customers tour its stores using their phone cameras.

It’s still early days for these projects, and the execution hasn’t been great. Lenovo’s Tango-powered Phab 2 Pro is more of a proof-of-concept than a groundbreaking product. But that could soon change. A second Tango-enabled smartphone, the Asus ZenFone AR, is set to hit the market this summer. Separately, the upcoming iPhone 8 is rumored to also feature a depth-sensing camera to support AR apps. It’s important to note that Apple typically waits until a new technology is mature—that is, until consumers are ready—before incorporating it into its flagship products. “Once the iPhone has that kind of camera,” Inbar notes, “it becomes the default standard.”

Wearable AR devices will be better used in the workplace

Despite the modest success of Snapchat and Pokémon Go, no one thinks the future of AR will involve people chasing Pokémons while staring at their smartphones.

That’s because the phone is a less-than-ideal interface. “Let’s say you walk into a supermarket that supports augmented reality,” said Tuong Nguyen, principal analyst at market research firm Gartner. “How many times are you willing to pull out your phone while you shop in the supermarket? How long are you willing to hold it?” He added that the biggest obstacle to the development of AR is that “it needs to be embedded in the glasses I already wear.”

Today, there are about 50 AR devices in production, from glasses that can display 3D images to Daqri's $20,000 industrial helmet. But for the majority of consumers, none of them are small, cheap, and beautiful enough. So in the next few years, AR devices will mainly appear in work environments, where their cost and appearance are not so important. According to ABI Research, the AR market size will grow to $96 billion by 2021, and products for industrial and commercial use will account for 60% of it.

For example, after failing to win over consumers, Glass has found a home on the factory floor. Boeing uses Glass to display technical specifications to workers installing electrical wiring harnesses on airplanes, freeing them from having to free their hands to look up information. (No one calls you a Glasshole when you can cut assembly time by 25 percent.) It’s not just Glass that’s being used in workflows: Scopis, a medical technology startup, built a HoloLens app to guide surgeons through spinal surgeries. At Mortenson Construction in Minneapolis, contractors can wear the Daqri Smart Helmet to tour a 3D model of a hospital under construction and see where plumbing will go, even though it’s not yet in place.

Widespread industrial applications will not only change the way we work, but will also inspire future consumer products. Just as industrial workers use AR to get remote assistance when performing complex operations, homeowners who want to remodel their bathrooms in the future may use a pair of glasses to enter a virtual world and study the effects of bathroom renovations in advance.

AR will be everywhere

Meanwhile, AR will continue to appear on a wide variety of everyday devices. If your car's rear camera shows a curved red line as you're backing into a tree, you're using AR. Skincare and beauty cosmetics brand Sephora is rolling out smart mirrors in its stores that allow customers to do virtual makeup trials. Neiman Marcus, a high-end department store in the United States, is also rolling out smart mirrors that allow customers to change the color of the clothes they're trying on or try on prescription glasses. Just as "adaptive cruise control" and "lane change assist" features are leading us to fully autonomous cars, AR will gradually penetrate into every aspect of our daily lives.

Augmentation is also likely to trickle down to cheaper wearables, judging by Snapchat’s video-capturing Spectacles and wireless earbuds like Apple’s AirPods. Doppler Labs already has Here One smart earbuds that let you amplify certain frequencies and filter out others — reinforcing your auditory reality. For CEO Noah Kraft, the future of AR will be a natural way to live in your ears. “You’re walking down the street and all of a sudden Siri pops up in your ear and says, ‘Hey, you’re 15 minutes late for your next meeting,’ ” he says. “In our world, that’s not disruptive to what’s going on around you.”

Still, bringing advanced and reliable industrial applications to a device that seamlessly integrates into our daily lives is a tall order. The technical challenges are great, and it’s unclear whether the public will embrace another wearable product (or whether the accompanying content will be good enough to entice them to use it). Yet Apple is reportedly working hard in this direction, as are Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many other companies.

For technology companies, getting involved in the AR market may be a matter of life and death. Piers Harding-Rolls, director of gaming research at London market research firm IHS Technology, pointed out that just as the Internet and mobile trends have completely changed the landscape of the technology industry, AR also has the potential to give rise to new giants and bring down old giants.

In other words, the future is augmented reality. But by the time it happens, we may not even notice.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.