The development of VR/AR at tech giants seemed heating up again in recent weeks.

• Apple was reported to have presented to a large internal group to showcase the company’s initiatives for VR/AR products. Now we can expect an AR headset by 2022 and more sophisticated AR glasses by 2023. How Apple is technically approaching the AR ecosystem was also revealed in a series of patents owned by the company. Tech-savvy readers, please dig in. 

• Facebook is busy beefing up its own AR/VR empire too. Buying game studios and inking exclusive deals for Oculus VR users are obviously not enough: back in September, Facebook acquired CTRL-Labs, whose neural interface technology is capable of "guessing" your intention through the hands' movement. Watch Thomas Reardon's presentation if you can. It's fascinating.

• Microsoft finally started shipping Hololens 2 this month with a price tag of $3,500. Snap, on the other hand, has been quietly sealing its leadership in the consumer AR usage and monetization. 

  • 68% of Snapchat's daily users play with AR, and  their engagement on average was 30 times/day

  • accounted for 70% of market share in AR advertising revenue

Tech giants all see VR/AR as the major computing platform in the next decade to come. In a Facebook internal email back in 2015, Mark Zuckerberg outlined his vision for the VR/AR ecosystem: applications that provide key user experiences, platforms on which developers could effectively build apps, and hardware/systems that make everything mentioned above possible. Although his effort of buying Unity was to no avail, Mark didn't stop throwing resources and investments into VR/AR business whatsoever.

To put things into perspective, we compiled a list of VR/AR-related M&A deals by major players since 2014. It shows that both Facebook and Apple have been quite active in searching for core technologies externally. Microsoft, on the other hand, has bee relying more on internal expertise.

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After the collapse of the initial hype of VR/AR, solid progress has been made but some technological challenges still remain. High-quality lenses, computing power, and batteries are often cited as main obstacles to tackle. We reckon the development of 5G, equipped with fast speed and low latency, could help solve part of the problems if not all. Take the obvious use-case of VR/AR for example, Ericsson has made a compelling case why 5G is the future of AR gaming.