Pandemic Fuels Augmented Reality (AR) Buzz in Local and Global markets

The Augmented Reality Report by Wizikey, Asia’s fastest-growing PR- SAAS Startup, highlights that Augmented Reality (AR) moved center stage in the after COVID-19 world. In an analysis of a million+ news articles, AR hit its high-point in the AC era. In AMJ’20, the AR buzz index moved 14x compared to the pre-COVID index in India. The global index moved 6x compared to the pre-COVID levels.

Top newsmakers associated with the term AR include Venture Capitalist Vinod Khosla and celebrated businessmen like Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries Ltd, Eric Yuan - CEO and Founder of Zoom Video Communications and Byju Raveendran - Founder of BYJU’s.

The report also revealed that AR association with business & technology has exploded. While BC, AR was more associated with entertainment and sports, in AC it is with Business and Technology.

Commenting on the AR report, Anshul Sushil CEO & Co-founder at Wizikey said, “AR technology is now a vaccine for a faster recovery of companies. As highlighted in the report, it’s noteworthy how the overall buzz of AR has grown in global and local markets in the age of social-distancing. The cutting-edge innovation in the AR space by global leaders and Indian startups is surely sprouting a new normal.”

According to the Wizikey AR Report, the increase in safe remote assistance, customer live walk-through, contact-less supports, visual-guided support catapulted buzz of AR amongst start-ups during the pandemic. BlinkIn emerges as the Buzz Maker followed by Immaginate and Queppelin. 

The top-drawers in the AR product category are Aarogya Setu App, Apple’s ARkit, Google’s ARCore, Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft HoloLens 2. In the BC era, Google Maps, iPhone XS/ XR, Pokemon Go, and Microsoft Zoho gained maximum buzz.

Report Methodology

Wizikey’s proprietary tech was used indexing all the category news chronologically and as per their average audience views. After this, the articles were indexed according to their headline and byline to see which organizations were mentioned the most in the indexed articles and what was the frequency of the names used. Once the top buzz-makers were identified, the volume of news made by each of them was analyzed and information was drawn on the following aspects. Their share in the cumulative amount of news created by all the top 10 participants.

 The Data Analytics Team at Wizikey identified the top trending words in the AR space through analysing 156776 from leading publications from March 2019 to June 2020. The report highlighted the buzz and buzz makers in the AR space in the local and global market before and after the outbreak. The timeline of the news created by them and when did they get the most amount of media attention. The report does a comparative analysis of the before & after COVID-19 era to understand the overall adoption of AR in the key domains.