The giant speeds up the landing of AR and expects the market to soar to $162 billion in 2020.

Pokemon GO has made more ordinary people know AR. At present, many applications have begun to support the simple experience of AR, mainly focused on the field of interactive entertainment to bring fresh experience.

original title: tycoons accelerate the real popularity of AR or two or three years later

Abstract: on December 6, Starbucks selected Shanghai Bakery to open, the world's largest Starbucks store is also a new retail testing ground jointly built by Starbucks and Alibaba: after consumers pay with Alipay. You can watch the whole process of roasting, production and cooking of Starbucks coffee through Mobile Taobao's "scan" function. At the same time, you can directly feel the details of each brew in a 2700 square meter workshop through AR technology.

Asahi, head of Ali AILabs, said that this cooperation is the first large-scale commercial application of AR indoor large object recognition technology in the world. The AR program, jointly developed by Alibaba artificial Intelligence Lab and Starbucks, is expected to be used in the remaining 3000 Starbucks stores across the country and may be exported to overseas stores.

A day earlier, Apple CEO Cook, an enthusiastic supporter of AR technology, visited the "Cloud classroom" of Luwan No. 1 Central Primary School in Shanghai and the game company Hero Entertainment. The ARKit app appeared on the paper-cut of the Shanghai primary school classroom, and Hero Entertainment also showed Cook the AR Demo filmed by iPhone 7 Plus.

there are signs that the giants are determined to accelerate the landing of their AR technology. However, Tsai Zhuo-Shao, an analyst for wearable devices at the Topping Industrial Research Institute, believes that these are more symbolic, and the giants are sensitive to the needs of the market and consumers, and can grasp business opportunities to invest and layout some resources.

"Ali is biased towards application service development. Although Apple has a software layout, it eventually enters the market through hardware such as glasses. For now, Apple is interested in the technology and is developing it internally, but even it will be difficult for Apple to launch AR glasses that meet the needs of consumers and have a controllable cost. The popularization of AR also needs to solve many problems in hardware, such as optical design, battery life, price, shape, and so on. " Cai Zhuoshao told reporters.

strong > the giant promotes the popularity of / strong >

Pokemon GO to let more ordinary people know AR. At present, many applications also begin to support the simple experience of AR, mainly concentrated in the field of interactive entertainment to bring fresh experience.

this year is an important year for AR. Apple, Google, Ali and others have launched their own AR platforms. It is widely believed that the efforts of Apple and Google will promote the popularity of AR on mobile phones.

in China, Alibaba launched the Alibaba AR open platform at the Cloud Conference this year, Tencent opened the AR platform through QQ at the Global Cooperation Conference in November, and Baidu launched the AR platform Dusee last year.

according to reports, in this cooperation with Starbucks, Ali realized the integration of deep learning and 3D spatial perception technology for the first time, overcame the difficulties of object transparency, morphological change, surface reflection and overexposure in the recognition process, and improved the recognition accuracy to 97.3%. This greatly expands the scope of application of AR technology in complex environments.

Ali is also quite active in AR investment. In addition to participating in many rounds of investment in the star enterprise Magic Leap, he also led the investment in Infinity AR, an Israeli AR company, and became its largest shareholder, followed by an investment in Israeli AR lens manufacturer Lumus.

Niantic CEO John Hanke, the developer of AR game "Pokemon GO", said a few days ago that giant platforms will become the starting point for AR to move towards mainstream.

strong > is not yet mature / strong >

at present, even though some software services incorporate AR technology and bring some new experience, they are still not subversive. In John Hanke's view, the future of AR belongs to AR glasses.

but the progress of AR glasses is rather slow. This year, Intel closed Recon, an AR glasses brand that focuses on sports and industry. Google Glass, which has been delisted, has made a comeback, but has abandoned the consumer version and switched to enterprises.

on the evening of December 5th, Apple's main supplier Quanta announced that it had reached a cooperation agreement with Israeli company Lumus to mass-produce AR glasses. CEO Ali Groman of Lumus said that this cooperation is expected to greatly reduce the price of AR lenses, thereby reducing the overall cost of AR products in the future. Groman also revealed, "Quanta computer has said that the overall price of AR helmets in the future will be lower than the price of high-end smartphones."

Cook said last October that there were still a series of obstacles to launching a high-quality smart glasses in the short term. For example, the display technology is not mature enough, he said at the time.

Tsai Zhuo-Shao also analyzed that at present, the experience of AR is still faced with problems such as optical design, battery life, user experience (including product form and interaction), ecological construction, and so on. "specifically, as a new thing, AR hardware design faces the threshold in terms of resolution, refresh rate, picture delay and so on. In terms of product form, it must be as light as ordinary glasses and wear naturally before the market can accept it, and only in interactive experience can we really liberate our hands to interact. In addition, AR technology is currently more interesting and does not bring about qualitative changes in experience. We need to do something in rigid demand functions such as navigation and shopping in order to be really popular. "

Quanta computer said that over the past two years, the company has been solving related technical problems, and after reaching a cooperation agreement with Lumus, AR smart glasses worth less than $1000 are no longer far away. It is speculated that the AR helmet using Lumus technology will go on sale in the next 12-18 months.

as to whether the cooperation is related to Apple, it is not possible to confirm at present. But this product may not be Apple's AR glasses, because the latest news is that Apple's AR glasses will be available in 2020.

Cai Zhuo-Shao believes that even in 2020, Apple's AR glasses may not be available on the market. Apple's idea is to make sure that the product can bring a good experience and market demand, and it is also likely that Apple will release helmet products first. At present, more applications are in phones and tablets.

IDC predicts that VR/AR will grow slowly in the next three years, and will enter a period of rapid growth in 2019 after three years of dormant years, and the market size is expected to soar to US $162 billion by 2020.

"if you watch VR/AR every day, its development may not be as fast as you expected. If you don't look at it for a while, you may find that it goes faster than you think." A VR hardware entrepreneur told reporters.

Edit: mary