Augmented Reality: Stocks To Invest In This Year

The market for Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) has been getting a lot of hype this year – with Oculus’ new feature of hand-tracking and Half-life: Alyx. The Allied Market Research has estimated the growth that it will reach by 2025 (which will be up to $571 billion); Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs has also made an estimate of the two markets alone, which will be worth about $80 billion in that time frame. This then concludes a huge difference of $491 billion in those two forecasts alone. 

Currently, the VR market has been pretty specific, with the hype around Half-Life: Alyx, beat saber, and much more – we know that the VR market is mainly focused on the gaming industry itself. But, with the AR’ market projection, we can see that AR has created multiple applications outside of the gaming industry, with education, business, communications and much more. This is partially why the market projections are so wildly different, nobody will know how large AR will grow or which markets will disrupt. 

So what should an investor do? A good idea is to invest into a dominant platform stock, that could take advantage of augmented reality – so if and when the technology becomes widely adopted you can invest into these two strong stocks: for recommendation are, Apple (NASDAQ: APPL) & Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK). 

Apple has been investing heavily in the augmented reality (AR) market. Unlike Google, we can see that Apple is, first and foremost, a device company. At the beginning of 2019 the company recorded that worldwide there are over 900 million active iPhone users worldwide; but, if we include IPads, the numbers would be approximately 1.2 billion, and with these numbers and devices Apple already has the potential to grow the AR market. 

In 2017, Apple released a group of AR software development tools, called ARKit, and recently following it up with ARKit 2.0, last year. These tools can now allow many businesses and other developers to start building AR applications for these devices. With its huge ecosystem of devices, Apple has a serious advantage over any other companies. 

Autodesk is one of the top leading platforms for 3D modeling and computer-aided design; with the company’s suite of products, it has become an industry-standard, starting with Revit and extending into other products like BIM 360, Navisworks, and 3ds Max. It all starts with the design model and the intergrain information that flows to more parts of the value essentials of the Autodesk suite. 

One of the most famous examples of augmented reality (AR) is Pokemon Go, the game that started a trend a few years ago. However, what’s more interesting than the game itself is the AR software that creates the close-to-cinematic visuals – With Unity technologies, they recently valued at almost $6 billion by venture capitalists, that provided the software. Unity then plans to go public, during the first year of 2020, according to the website Cheddar.