Augmented Reality (AR) And Virtual Reality (VR) Stocks to Keep On Your Radar

If you haven’t heard the news, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are shaping up to become the fastest-growing things in tech. Indeed, Facebook’s very own Mark Zuckerberg is even calling it the next computing platform.

Zuckerberg’s not alone here, either. Apple is well on its way to launching its first headset next year. Snap continues to pump out new AR tools and filters, presumably gearing up for the transition to AR retail. And, more broadly, AR and VR are starting to gain traction in everything from entertainment and marketing to professional development and enterprise workflows.

So, the real question now is not “should I invest in VR and AR?” Instead, now we should all be asking ourselves, “which AR and VR stocks should I be investing in?” And that is precisely the question we’re going to answer.

Facebook (NASDAQ: FB): A Market Leader with a Huge AR/AR Team

The number one VR and AR stock on everyone’s radars right now is Facebook. And with good reason. Mark Zuckerberg has been quite vocal about the companies intentions in the space. He has even gone so far as to declare that the company will no longer be known as a social media company in five years. Instead, he hopes, it will be known as a “metaverse” company.

It’s not all talk, either. Facebook is showing great commitment to the space. It has 20% of its workforce already dedicated to it. And it has also been pumping out a pretty consistent stream of inventions and gadgets through its Reality Labs (even if most of them aren’t ready for market yet).

Besides action and intention, Facebook also has its dominant market position going for it. With approximately 2 billion Daily Active Users (DAU) on its platforms, it already has a formidable launching point into the VR and AR market. Of course, its acquisition of Oculus also helps.

Of course, its size also works against it as a strong VR and AR play. If it can’t find ways to either increase its ad revenues through VR and AR or find new revenue streams (besides loss-leading hardware sales), then there is a small risk of growth stagnation.

Snap Inc (NYSE: SNAP): Easy, Social AR is Already a Thing

One of the biggest barriers in AR and VR that companies have struggled with is the ease of use. For the most part, these new immersive experiences have required jumping over some sort of hurdle first. And this doesn’t just include putting on a new headset. AR apps, for example, have often caused a big break in user experience. Take an AR billboard, for example—requiring people to pull out their phones, download an app, and then point the camera at the billboard means that, despite the existence of an AR experience, that billboard will forever be little more than a regular 2D billboard.

But Snap already has people using its app with almost 300 million DAU. That makes the company’s AR experiences seamless in the user experience.

And while, for now, the company has only been putting its AR technology at the service of kids and big kids with short attention spans by way of its “lenses,” there is a bigger AR opportunity here. Namely, once it starts integrating things like AR shopping experiences into its platform, it will start delivering the kind of seamless AR retail and marketing experiences that have eluded us until now.

XRApplied Technologies Inc. (CSE: XRA): High Tech for Enterprises Big and Small

With Facebook and Snap heavily focussed on capturing the social side of the market, there’s still a giant hole on the enterprise side—the side where some of the biggest demand for AR and VR is starting to develop.

This is where XRApplied is positioning itself right now—as the VR and AR company for enterprise users, both big and small.

To do this, XRApplied has invested a considerable amount of sweat equity, building out a suite of proprietary tools that slash the time and cost of VR and AR development. This includes software development kits, marketing platforms, and other tools for gamification and creating interactivity in immersive 3-dimensional spaces.

What’s exciting about XRApplied as an AR and VR opportunity is its early market-leading foothold in this space coupled with its unlimited growth potential. Unlike Facebook and Snap, which are now likely to be too big for exponential growth, XRApplied is still a younger company with a pure focus on AR and VR.

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(Featured image by Anna Nekrashevich via Pexels)

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