In this video clip from "The Virtual Opportunities Show" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on May 31, Fool.com contributor Travis Hoium explains how Microsoft (MSFT 1.25%), Apple (AAPL +0.87%), and other large companies will be leaders in AR because they have the resources and will use their technology across a variety of industries with very practical use cases.
Travis Hoium: I think this is really where the AR and VR is probably going to advance first. Apple will be really interesting to watch from a consumer perspective. But if you think about even the value of an iPhone, you can go download, what is it? A hundred thousand, 200,000 apps today. When the iPhone first launched, we didn't have that. There's this, it's the same thing with the PC. If you were buying a PC in 1978, there wasn't a whole lot to do on it. You go fast forward to 1995 and you can do all kinds of different stuff.
This is the place where this technology is right now is great the tools exist, the HoloLens, the Oculus Quest, things like that. But now you have to build the applications for it that add value in some way, shape, or form. Is that going to be consumers, or it's going to be businesses? I think that you laid out really well why it's actually businesses that are probably going to see a benefit to this first.
The question is always been, even from that side is you have to find something that is high-value enough or modular enough that you can build it and make it, make any financial sense if you have to have five developers working for a year to build your factory line, to build all this stuff in, I mean, just do some ballpark math. You're spending a million dollars to build a piece of content. Now, you have to get a million dollars of value out of it. That's harder to do.
I think this stuff is coming. I think that what Microsoft is working on is really interesting, is probably a great use case. But it'll be interesting to see how they are able to build the platforms and the software tools that then an engineer who maybe is remote can drop in and add value on the spot because I think, I worked at a manufacturing plant for a couple of years and some of the engineers have to live within a certain amount of distance from the plant because if something goes down and you get a call at three in the morning, you have to come in and figure it out.
If you're running a line that is making $30,000 a minute of product you better drive as quick as you can to get there. Now if you can just pop your headset on and you can be anywhere [laughs] in the world. That's pretty cool. There's a real value case there. I think that's going to be interesting to watch for Microsoft and for the AR space in particular.
