In the last decade, Augmented Reality (AR) has been one of the emerging technologies that have been in the centre of attention among academics and business practitioners. Despite the numerous studies which have demonstrated the multitude of benefits derived from AR applications, the technology has not reached yet its full potential due to various bottlenecks which are preventing it from becoming the mainstream technology that many have anticipated. In this paper, we first present briefly the history of AR followed by the evolution of related software algorithms and hardware devices. The main contribution of this paper is the overview of the drivers and challenges related to the adoption and diffusion of AR across five major application domains; (a) industry and military, (b) training and education, (c) travel and tourism, (d) medicine and health care and (e) retail and marketing. Such overview facilitates especially a cross-domain comparison, which here enabled us to identify a list of five drivers and five bottlenecks in the adoption of the current AR technology.
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