With the surge in online Augmented Reality, we often get asked, “How many people actually have webcams?” Given webcams are becoming a standard accessory to new laptops (and desktops) we’ve spent some time compiling numbers that we’d like to share:

• 79% of laptops now have webcams. (source: PC world)
• 72% of 18-20 year olds own a laptop. (source: Pew Internet & American Life Project)
• 83% of college students own a laptop. (source: Student Monitor)
• More than 50% of Gen Y owns a webcam. (source: Cisco)
• As of March 2011, more than 40% of Skype minutes involve video to video calls (source: Skype)

Furthermore, on recent web-based Augmented Reality projects we’ve launched both on our own (Cannonballz) and for clients, we’ve seen on average approximately 78% of users with webcams enabled.

With the continued growth of video chat and Augmented Reality, it’s an inevitability that webcam’s will be a standard of any PC experience in the near future.  Though most web-based Augmented Reality is a solo experience, with the growing popularity of video chat, we can expect to see Augmented Reality evolve to a one-to-one and even one-to-many proposition.  The following press announcements from Google, Facebook and Skype help to show how video chat is integrating itself into the social experience:

• Facebook To Unveil Skype-Powered Video Chat
• Google’s New Social Effort Google+ Will Enable Video Conferencing “Hangouts”

Social Media is all the rage now, but interactive video chats will help evolve conversations and collaboration to an even more real-time experience.  If you haven’t seen our ZugSTAR prototype, take a minute to check it out below to see how the interactive video chat experience can work from anything to Virtual Dressing Rooms to Telemedicine.