Last week we launched our'Layered' report in partnership with Zappar - a groundbreaking study of the consumer, neurological and brand impact of augmented reality. For the first time ever, augmented reality has been put under the spotlight and dissected to gain valuable insights into AR's core benefits and use cases. In this post, I wanted to share some key findings and emerging trends - including AR's applications and impact from a marketing, brand and consumer perspective now, as well as its implications for the future. While both AR and VR can be considered part of the fourth wave of immersive computing (after The PC, Internet & Mobile waves), AR holds more sway right now because of its immediate impact on brands. Infrastructure development - the growth of a developer ecosystem that includes Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore (and of course ZapWorks) will act as a catalyst for creators and innovators to unlock the accessibility and ease of use to create valuable AR experiences for the masses.

Deep learning libraries and frameworks such as Theano, Keras, Caffe, and TensorFlow have gained enormous recent popularity. In fact, Google's TensorFlow is the most starred machine learning repository on Github. TensorFlow, despite being in the wild for little more than 6 months, has captured such a formidable market share that one could argue that it has become the default deep learning library by a large swath of seasoned neural network veterans and newcomers alike. It's not the only library to consider, obviously. There are many others, a few of which are mentioned above.