I read that as AR development having more in common with game development, which makes sense given the emphasis on performance, 3D rendering, and latency.
Yeah, I should have said it could benefit from using a fully-fledged game engine, considering you'll likely need to import 3D models, have objects interact with each other, and so on which Unity would help a lot with.
However, I primarily do experimental work in those engines, so I'm pretty biased.
VR also has a ton of non-game use cases. This is one of the biggest issues with VR marketing. But yes, as other commenters have mentioned, AR development still benefits from using a game engine (maybe rebranding 3D application framework would make it more palatable to "serious app developers") because you probably want do work with 3D models\rendering.
You are confusing VR and AR. AR has a ton of legitimate use cases outside gaming:
- https://storify.com/lukew/what-would-augment-reality
- http://www.madewitharkit.com/ideas and their twitter https://twitter.com/madewitharkit