AR/VR: 60% growth anticipated in year ahead, 140% within 5 years

Chris Turner, CEO of Business Advantage Group commented, “We see Augmented Reality (AR) as a spectrum with pure reality at one end and wholly Virtual Reality (VR) at the other end. Currently for CAD users, managers and executives this trend has low current usage and importance, but very strong future growth potential is predicted by survey respondents.”

The Augmented/Virtual Reality Trend is ranked 11^th most important of the 15 trends CAD Trends we studied but its Importance is increasing - from 4.5 to 4.9 (out of 10) between late 2014 and late 2015. In the same period Awareness of Augmented/Virtual Reality increased, from 18 to 22%, and usage also increased, from 3 to 5%. In terms of users, about 1 in 20 CAD users is using AR/VR technology and this applies across all industry sectors, company sizes and geographic regions. However, CAD users are predicting fast growth albeit from a low base – 60% this year (from 5 to 8% usage) and 140% within 5 years (from 5 to 12% usage). There is no particular standout area for the predicted future growth – similar levels are seen across all subgroups.

“Augmented Reality is a very exciting and fast developing trend with practical use cases in many industries. For example in AEC, during the design phase for collaboratively developing design intent between all stakeholders, during pre-construction for training and communicating design intent with the on-site team, during construction for monitoring progress and quality, then in facility management during the life of the structure for monitoring maintenance history. A key point for CAD software developers, who are under pressure to figure out what they're doing with AR, is the User Interface (UI) which, of course, needs to be very different from the UI we all so familiarly use on a flat computer screen. Compare the simplicity of the new Pokémon Go game to AR visions in CAD that have sometimes been too complicated and haven’t taken off. Based on other recent research we’ve done, we predict many more AR software apps in the market in the coming years.”

The Worldwide CAD Trends 2016 Survey Report is a high level report and many deeper insights are available from the full data set.