Augmented Reality (AR) - Leaders and Trend Setters Over time, we've seen Augmented Reality move from being a futuristic concept to having use cases in education, interior design, planning, museums, and other environments where the virtual and physical worlds overlap. As per recent Statista data, by 2024 there will be an estimated 1.7 billion mobile augmented reality (AR) users worldwide, a rise of 1.5 billion from the 200 million seen in 2015. In the latest ESG & Tech Show episode , I focused on what’s underpinning this growth, the new business models that are developing along the way and of course, the stocks to analyse. If you’ve ever built a PowerPoint slide, you already have a very good idea of what AR means. You start off with a blank slide and then add layers of text and images. In this case, you’re “augmenting” the reality of that slide. You might then add clickable objects or buttons that can lead to different slides. That is adding a layer of interactivity to that blank canvas. If you’re with me so far, then imagine those very same ideas only being applied to buildings, open spaces and any other physical plane! Virtual reality goes another step by immersing your senses (i.e. sound, vision and perhaps touch) with a headset and joystick so that it really does feel like you’re in another world. Naturally, as soon as we talk about this, we’re going to move into metaverse territory. As a simple explanation of that, the metaverse is the transition of a 2-dimensional web world where you can see everything on a flat screen (i.e. those people tuning into the show could see what I was doing on a square box in front of them) to a 3D digital experience (i.e. where those watching the show would feel like they were sitting opposite me in VectorVest’s super training centre in North Carolina!