While all major OEMs are well equipped to deliver the immersive digital social world that Facebook kicks off with ‘Meta‘, 2022 will see AR/VR devices finally becoming mainstream with all leading smartphone OEMs expected announcing their gears.
Interestingly in a recent conversation with a leading OEM of smartphone, we were just discussing how the product evolution can be best captured and my answer was to keep a tab on the apps and their popularity and growing base. As an example, I shared how the cryptocurrency apps can have new requirements from the device.
If we look at the evolution of how smartphones have been consistently adding to their use cases through apps and then their impact on the features and specifications of the device, there are several examples to talk about. One major shift was due to social media apps like Instagram, where camera became an essential specification and with filters, etc., the selfie world came to existence. Similarly, with OTT apps, display and battery got pushed to limits. One can go on writing about such examples!
From smartphone capabilities perspective in India, all major OEMs have ARCore certified devices, an Android certification which confirms about the AR / VR experience quality matching the defined standards. Samsung leads with 100 smartphone models passing the certification out of 353 such models sold and/or in use in India. The other factor defining the ARCore certification is the Android OS version in use. At least the smartphone should be working on Android 7 or later. At present in India, 96.8% of the android smartphones are running on Android 7 or later versions, which shouldn’t be a concern for users leveraging the immersive experience of Meta.
Other than smartphones, the next big smart device which will see steep growth in 2022 and onwards is AR/VR gear and smart glasses. The recent news around Facebook looking at metaverse as well as its announcement of a tie-up with Ray-Ban had already given enough hints at where its heading. Now this opens up immense opportunity for billions of AR/VR gear and smart glasses to let a huge base of Facebook, now Meta users experience the immersive digital.
From revenues standpoint, this defining shift of Facebook towards a digital social world of its own, will create very substantial and sustainable growth oriented advertising and commerce opportunities for the company. Other than the regular social networking, the company will now be able to monetize with premium on advertisements as well as grow immensely in gaming. Opening up for developers, Meta can become the universe of metaverse where developers can create several interesting and engaging immersive experience, increasing the MAU and DAU for the platform. If not for Facebook, WhatsApp is already leading the DAU for billions of smartphone users making Facebook among leading most engaged ecosystems in the digital world. With an added layer of ‘social immersive digital’ through Meta, it can take over the maximum of any smartphone user’s daily average usage time becoming the default ‘super ecosystem’ for the digital natives.
