Juniper Research has released a new market forecast that looks at the area of augmented reality apps on mobile.

Their conclusion is everything is now in place so that mobile AR should enter a period of rapid growth over the next several years.

Juniper estimates that the market for mobile augmented reality (AR) in 2010 will represent only about $2 million. However, over the next 4 years is will grow very rapidly reaching over $730 million in 2014.

There are several key factors that will be driving this growth:

• increasing adoption of smartphones such as Android and iPhone,
• availability of handsets with high quality screens,
• more widespread usage of GPS in handsets,
• proliferation of sensors such as compass and accelerometers.

In fact, the report projects that by 2014 there will be around 350 million AR enabled handsets in the market.

The initial revenues from mobile AR is expected to come initially from location-based search which are enhanced by AR. Subsequently, AR based games will be a big revenue driver, along with enterprise solutions which will start in 2012-2013.

In addition, Juniper projects that advertising will be a significant part of the mobile AR revenue stream. With the additional “location relevance” that AR can give, ad networks should be able to charge higher rates for AR enabled ads. This advertising revenue stream will start off quite low as the number of AR handsets is initially small, but it will grow towards the end of the forecast period.

Other articles of interest:
• Visual Interactivity: The Next Great Way To Engage Consumers
• IKEA Uses Mobile Augmented Reality To Engage Shoppers’ Imagination