14 May 2025
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AWE Team
The AR Alliance: What’s All the Buzz About?
AWE USA 2025
Augmented Reality (AR) is transforming industries, from healthcare and manufacturing to retail and education, and in the coming years, AR glasses are expected to be as ubiquitous as smartphones. To foster the growth of this market, a group of companies and organizations, from large technology leaders to innovative start-ups, and universities to research organizations, have come together in the AR Alliance. These companies, organizations and industry stakeholders are addressing the challenges and opportunities faced by the industry.
One of the key challenges is to enable AR to scale efficiently and provide seamless experiences to users. One way to achieve this is through standardized frameworks. Standardization helps create a stable foundation for businesses to innovate and scale their AR applications without worrying about shifting protocols, changing market realities, or compatibility issues.
When industries align on common standards, the marketplace experiences greater collaborative opportunities, reduced costs, and accelerated adoption of AR solutions in enterprise and consumer markets. To this end, the AR Alliance has formed several technical working groups to explore and examine the current landscape and challenges that the industry should address to enable AR, both from the industry’s perspective and the end-users’ standpoint. For example, our Accessibility Working Group is exploring topics such as Assistive Technology in order to showcase the potential of AR to enhance the lives of people at all levels of ability, incentivizing regulators to craft AR-specific regulation that preserves this potential. Our deep dive into this topic can help the industry lay the groundwork for the development of AR Accessibility standards by creating and publishing informational resources on AR accessibility challenges and mitigations. By giving the industry the tools needed to support accessibility, future standards can be shaped to include proven best practices and to accommodate the limitations of AR hardware.
Another example is the work of our Integrating Prescription Lenses Working Group, which recognizes the diverse refractive correction needs of the population and strives to explore and identify corrective vision solutions for AR experiences. By doing a deep dive into this topic, we aim to lay the groundwork for industry standards and best practices for refractive error correction, optimizing comfortable and effective vision for AR users.
The AR Alliance is a neutral and inclusive platform for everyone in the industry to come together and collaborate on common challenges. Stop by The AR Alliance networking lounge (#227) at AWE USA 2025 to learn about what we do and to also share your thoughts with us. We'd love to hear them!
