Mike Boland (ARtillery Intelligence) on the Motivations and Machinations of the Major Players in AR

The Guest

Mike Boland is the Founder & Chief Analyst of ARtillery Intelligence, Editor of AR Insider, Lead Analyst of Street Fight, and the President of the San Francisco chapter of the VR/AR Association.

Earlier in his career, Mike was one of Silicon Valley's first tech reporters focused on the internet as a staff reporter for Forbes magazine starting in 2000. And he has been a tech industry analyst at top-tier research firms since 2005.

Mike is a frequent speaker at industry conferences [such as Augmented World Expo, VRLA, and ad:tech. He has authored more than 120 market forecasts and in-depth reports on the tech & media landscape including social, mobile and AR. He contributes regularly to news sites such as TechCrunch, Business Insider, VentureBeat and the Huffington Post, and he gets quoted in publications such as The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

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Mike is a trusted source and very insightful. That becomes clear in this conversation too.

The Conversation

Here we explore the markets and market forecasts for mobile AR and smartglasses. We talk about Apple’s motivations and plans. And we discuss Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Snap, trying to guess where they might be going based on their motivations and past behavior.

Mike draws lessons from the smartphone era and applies them to what’s happening today, and where we’ll be in 2023. He recalls it took several years for truly native thinking to emerge – where designers took full advantage of the interactions and capabilities that were unique to mobile phones.

We also get into pass-through video versus optical see-through smartglasses.

This was a really fun conversation, and I think you’ll love it.

Jason McDowallAR Cloud, AR smartglasses, mobile AR, sdk