AR in 2025: What consumers really want (and why many still don't care)

Augmented reality is nice on paper, but does it really excite people? AR Insider wanted to get to the bottom of it by surveying over 52,000 Americans.

Among people already using AR, gaming is the big winner (59% are all in). Next come education (42%), social stuff like funny filters (41%), city guides (40%), and visualising products at home before buying them (38%).

Some interesting points: after a big drop during Covid, in-store shopping AR is stabilising. However, social AR continues to rise — we all love sharing selfies with silly filters! Visual search (like Google Lens or Ray-Ban Meta glasses) is also on the rise — 33% of AR users are interested in it, compared to 27% a few years ago. This makes sense with advances in AI making object recognition more impressive.

But there’s a catch: on the side of non-users (who still represent 65% of respondents), 61% couldn’t care less about AR, regardless of the format. And this figure has risen by 6 points since the last survey. Is the novelty effect wearing off?

Among these skeptics, if we had to convince them, it would be with educational AR (14%), city guides (11%), or product visualisation (9%).

The thing to remember: AR developers would do well to listen to these non-users if they want to conquer the general public someday. Tech-savvy nerds are already convinced, but how to win over the broader public? That’s the whole challenge for AR to really take off!