Consumers’ Perception of Augmented Reality as an Emerging end User Technology: Social Media Monitoring Applied

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) is at a point where it is mature enough to be used in publicly available consumer applications. Nevertheless, the real commercial breakthrough of AR is still lacking. One reason for this is a deficit in consumer research regarding users’ perception, acceptance and attitude towards this technology. This paper remedies this lack by means of a novel social media monitoring method. Thereby, the population of 48,560 consumer comments published up until July 2013 on English speaking online community websites treating the topic AR, were extracted from the web and analyzed. The results indicate that consumers evaluate the technology positively and highly appreciate its idea and concept. Still, some obstacles need to be overcome before AR succeeds in becoming adopted by the mainstream user. Above all, there is a lack of consumer awareness, particularly regarding specific applications or products, in addition to technical, developmental and ethical problems. Nevertheless, AR technologies are on the rise and will become more important in the end user sphere, especially in the gaming sector and for information and knowledge transfer.