Augmented Reality glasses set to become more popular than smartphones, says Augmented Reality promoter

In the future, smart glasses (or AR, Augmented Reality glasses) will become more popular than smartphones -- although we are talking about the pretty distant future.

This unlikely sounding conclusion -- particularly given the recent demise of Google’s Glass Explorer project -- was reached by a report from Augmentedreality.org, although it is potentially somewhat biased in that it’s an organization "committed to advancing Augmented Reality".

At any rate, the Smart Glasses Market 2015 report (spotted by Wareable) claims that the number of smart glasses shipped worldwide will reach a billion come 2020, and will exceed the predicted number of mobile phone shipments when 2025 arrives.

10 new smart glasses were launched last year, and in the near-term, the research predicts that shipments will reach one million by the autumn of 2015, increasing to 10 million by the following year. Initially, most adoption will come from the enterprise world.

Augmentedreality.org notes that the early winners in the smart glasses arena will emerge by the close of 2016, with a major "shakeup" expected around then in terms of big investments and mergers or acquisitions.

The company stated: "Consumer electronics giants, and other players in the ecosystem have no more than a 12 months window to position their companies in the space (build, buy, partner) -- or risk missing the opportunity".

Well, we shall see -- there are certainly some interesting projects which have been freshly unveiled, most notably Microsoft HoloLens, which could succeed in sparking more interest than Google Glass did with consumers. The enterprise, meanwhile, is definitely the area to keep your eye (or perhaps lens) on when it comes to pushing smart glasses tech…

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