The Phygital Future: Predictions From AR Entrepreneur Anna Belova

Forbes’ 30 Under 30 honouree Anna Belova has recently asserted that the digital economy must go ‘phygital’ to avoid cannibalizing itself. Anna’s stance evangelizes Augmented Reality (AR) and a slew of emerging technologies at a time when the world is outpaced by them.

In 2019, Anna Belova was featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 award category for her youthful accomplishments in edtech and Augmented Reality(AR). Three years later, the Russian co-founder of DEVAR, a New Jersey-based AR company, is rallying the world to phygital, an AR-driven economy, and this is all thanks to her company’s success in the development of AR content and products.

Phygital is the AR-based economic model Ann believes could forestall what she describes as the inevitable “cannibalism” of the digital economy.

According to her, any technological move to keep the digital economy alive must begin with an expansion outside it with Augmented Reality(AR )and other complementing technologies that can actively shape the interaction between the physical world and the digital space as we know it.

“You can think of Phygital as an evolution of everything that has been developed in computing, AR, VR and is set to dramatically change the way we live, work, communicate, travel, study, entertain and much more”, Ann recently told POSTR. “We are heading to a future where all physical objects in the future will be Phygital, i.e.powered by a set of breakthroughs (AR, IoT, M2M, etc.), while online environments (Social media, eCommerce, etc.) that exist today in the digital form only will finally merge with physical objects not just as an add-on, but rather as an integral part of it”.

Revamping the Digital Economy

Commenting on the state of the digital economy, Anna stated: “ Despite its rapid growth in recent decades, the digital economy still accounts for less than 6% of the total economy, while the traditional economy still dominates heavily. But with the rise of digital natives, we estimate it will reach at least 50% of the world GDP within the next 15–25 years — that’s a whopping $100–200 trillion upside. On the other hand, we can see that the digital economy is under a huge threat itself as it will very shortly reach its full capacity in terms of user penetration worldwide”.

DEVAR’s recent technological strides in edtech show that revamping the digital economy is a concerted effort targeted at improving and sustaining it within a new set of protocols driven by the convergence of emerging technologies and their breakthroughs. In the last two years, DEVAR has created a series of educational augmented reality products for kids, including books, toys, flashcards, and playsets thereby enabling AR to hugely impact learning in the phygital world.

The economic impact of Phygital can be measured in terms of its enormous potential to boost efficiency and productivity across all the major economic sectors.

In essence, it is predicted that the Phygital revolution will lead to a dramatic redistribution of wealth and assets, primarily disrupting the offline world and acting as a gateway to the offline economy for today’s digital enterprises.