Extended Reality, Smart Mirrors, + 2 more technologies of tomorrow
Exploding Topics scours the internet to find emerging trends before they take off.
Here are four of the latest developments, along with some insights and analysis to help you take advantage.
1. Extended Reality
Searches for “extended reality” have increased by 8.6x over the last 5 years. And 1028% over the 6 months.
Extended reality (XR) is the combination of real and virtual environments via technology including AR, VR and wearables.
What sets the XR market apart from traditional VR is XR’s large number of commercial and industrial applications.
Today, 53% of XR spending comes from consumer products. But Accenture reports that the XR manufacturing space will overtake consumer spending this year.
The same study estimates that XR spending by the manufacturing and construction industries alone will reach $35B by 2023 — nearly 2x what the entire industry is worth today.
What’s Next:
Examples of industrial and B2B XR startups include:
Varjo: Industry-focused XR hardware company known for its “dual-resolution displays”. Use cases for Varjo’s hardware include industrial design, research, training and health care. The company has raised $99M to date, including a $54M Series C in September.
Nreal: China-based XR startup that develops a line of lightweight mixed reality headsets. The company raised a $40M seed round in September.
Labster: Virtual lab startup focused on the university and high school market. Labster’s user base has increased 15x since last March. Raised a $9M round in August to fund expansion into the Asian market.
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2. Smart mirror
A smart mirror is a mirror with a built-in LED display.
The display is designed for quickly viewing snippets of information, like time, weather and stock quotes.
And many smart mirrors are designed for specific use cases.
Like the HiMirror, which offers beauty and makeup tips based on your appearance.
The WOLFBOX smart rearview mirror for cars, which includes a backup camera, clock display and dashcam.
Or the smart fitness equipment brand Mirror, acquired last year for $500M.
What’s next:
Smart mirrors are part of the smart home meta trend.
A recent survey found that 65% of Americans own at least one smart device.
And as IoT tech becomes cheaper, smaller and more reliable, the smart home market is projected to grow from $78.3B this year to $135.3B by 2025.
Other examples of this meta trend include smart scales, smart grills, and smart light bulbs.
3. Bambuser
Bambuser is a live video shopping platform for fashion and beauty brands, like Esprit and Luisa Via Roma.
The company has seen rapid growth during the pandemic — Bambuser reports that their customer base increased by 105% in Q4 2020 alone.
Largely due to this rapid growth, Bambuser raised $45M in funding last year.
What’s next:
Bambuser is part of the “live video shopping” meta trend.
Live video shopping is basically the internet version of the Home Shopping Network and QVC.
The trend is already relatively mainstream in Asia (live streaming sales in China reached $136B last year). And the practice is starting to gain traction in the US.
Players in the live video shopping space include Amazon Live Shopping, Alibaba’s Taobao Live (which brought in $2.85B in sales a single day), and indie-brand focused Popshop Live.
4. OTT Platform
Searches for “OTT Platform” have increased by 844% over the last year.
What is it?
“Over-the-top” media, or “OTT”, is any streaming media that bypasses traditional TV and cable.
In March of last year, 44 million households streamed OTT content. That number grew to over 300 million during the pandemic.
The most well-known OTT streaming services are Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Video, Hulu, and Disney+. These 5 players alone make up 83% of the market (as measured by total viewing time).
But dozens of startups are launching OTT streaming services to compete with the Netflixes of the world.
Hence the huge spike in searches for OTT platforms.
What’s Next:
Monthly subscriptions are only a small slice of the OTT revenue pie.
In fact, Comscore reports that ad-supported OTT is growing faster than subscription OTT. And a recent survey found that 20% of Americans use ad-supported OTT services.
Major players in this space include:
Pluto TV, an ad-supported streaming platform that’s received $51.8M in funding to date.
Fite, the Netflix for combat sports, has a combination of ad-supported and pay-per-view monetization models.
And Tubi, another popular ad-monetized streaming service. They were acquired last year by Fox for $440M.
Here for the extended reality conversation. Just bought the oculus quest 2 - it's beyond me how the whole world isn't talking about VR nonstop these days, especially with the pandemic.
When I first got it I thought "who cares about augmented reality when you can have virtual reality which is fully immersive?" But then if you actually play around with AR you realize it's equally as crazy because of how invasive it feels to bring weird creatures into your actual home haha