For everyone interested, here's the summary of my presentation at the Augmented Reality Los Angeles meetup in January, along with the slideshare.
Since working its way in to mainstream vernacular in 2009, the Augmented Reality industry is poised to reach its first major crossroads. Though the technology now has the power to be a solid interface component in larger applications, it’s still mostly being used as a one-shot marketing gimmick. The impractical applications of the marketing sector overshadow many exciting innovations, and may ultimately affect the overall progress of AR. If the genre is to progress at the maximum pace possible, it’s important that these impractical applications fall by the wayside.
Most gimmicky AR executions are lacking the following:
- A practical purpose for the user that gives them a clear goal for using the application.
- An interface that is worth using over traditional GUIs.
- Any reason for using AR, in the first place.
- Reusability beyond, “hey, look what my computer/phone can do!”
- Functionality that is anything more than a less featured copy of another application.
Examples of impractical AR
Mobile, location AR where geo-tagging doesn’t serve and everyday purpose.
One of the biggest press magnets of last year were AR Twitter apps for mobile. Although they sound good in concept, with the lack of geo-tagged tweets available, these applications don’t serve a practical purpose.
In slide 7, you can see that, while the application displays the tweet as being somewhere in the city, it’s probably on the other side of the continent.
Mobile, location AR that uses solely GPS, compass and accelerometer input.
Anyone who has used applications of this type (most of mobile AR), knows how shaky objects appearing on the screen are. Many times, the compass is so far off that objects won’t be anywhere near the right location at all. Until hyper-location, the ability to use camera data to pinpoint the user, is available for these applications, they won’t be ready for everyday use.
Layered animation with little or no feedback based on user position and orientation.
Some developers are just putting static art and information over a video feed and calling it AR. While it may meet the loosest definition of the term, this model has absolutely no sustainability in the genre.
iPew for the iPhone (slide 9) displays animations of guns firing over the video feed. This application does not utilize any information about the users location or orientation.
3D Models placed in a webcam with little or no interactivity and with no deeper goal for the user.
Browser based, true AR currently has the most resources at its disposal to create lasting, useful AR for the consumer, making this model the most offensive of the group. Almost all desktop AR, right now, is this type of execution, which is a cookie-cutter approach to the technology.
Once a developer has created an application with the ability to display a 3D model, he can pump out one after the other simply by changing the model file. This seems to be the case with the majority of the applications from some of the biggest players in the AR industry, who sometimes charge up to six figures for one of these executions.
The offense is even greater when you consider that these developers have a multitude of tools available to make the execution better, including motion capture, body recognition, social networking and open APIs for many major sites online. These applications show pure lack of creativity from their developers.
Examples of useful AR
Within the multitude of AR applications currently available to the public are a few gems that exhibit a desire, on the part of the developer, to move AR into the realm of the useful.
Mobile location AR drawing from a large database with customization features.
While the lack of hyper-location in mobile location AR keeps it from being currently practical, applications like Wikitude and Layar are doing the most they can with current abilities, and are preparing their applications for mainstream, future use. Multiple data overlays, coupled with open APIs, allowing third party developers to add to the platform, prepare these applications for hyper-location awesomeness.
True AR applications that provide an engaging, persistent experience to the user.
The best examples of AR are those that recognize its potential as in interface to serve a larger purpose. The United States Postal Service’s Virtual Box Simulator, by AKQA (slide 12), presents AR in real context to the user by allowing them to find the appropriate box to ship an item. Kweekies, by int13 (slide 13), is an full, Pokemon style game where you train and battle your pets in an AR world. They decided to use a traditional, touchscreen GUI for all other functions in the game, not only making it more useful, but allowing the AR to really shine.
Essential things to understands about AR
It’s very easy to slip into the mindset of creating AR for the sake of AR itself, but if you keep certain things in mind through the development process, you’ll be more likely to create impacting, lasting applications. Here are some good things to remember:
We are on the verge of a major shift in the human/computer interface.
AR is going to be as big an interface shift as the GUI was in the 1980s. Within the next five to ten years, everyone will be interacting with their computers and devices through AR. Keeping focus on the things you would like to see in that time frame will help you push your applications towards innovation.
The best applications of AR don’t only place the digital over the real, but make the two converge.
One of the biggest cliches used by journalists, when talking about AR, is Minority Report. In the movie, Tom Cruise’s character is interacting with a wide array of devices that recognize both his identity and movements. What is so compelling about AR development that is working to make this science fiction reality is that rather than simply allowing a viewport from reality into the digital world, it blurs the line between the two.
Don’t let the infancy of this technology fool you. It can be used for practical purposes.
One of the most common excuses I hear for gimmicky AR is that this technology is so new that people are still figuring out how to use it. While this is true to an extent, when you regard AR as an interface and see the forest for the trees, opportunities to use it for practical application become clearer.
In the personal computer boom of the late 1970s, the power of the computers at the disposal of developers paled in comparison to what we have available for AR today. Still, these developers used ingenuity and creativity to make a wide array of useful, everyday applications for those systems.
Don’t be satisfied with just accomplishing the technical side of AR. Rework it, over and over again, until its something that engages your audience.
In summation: please stop building useless AR
You are either on one side or the other in this debate - you care about this technology and want to better people’s lives with it, or you’re looking to make a quick buck off of the “new thing.” There may be some gray area, but it’s minimal.
Imagine the ability for a doctor, at the hospital, to show and rotate 3D body scans to his patient, who’s at home, simply by holding up a marker to a camera. This is one of the applications we had in mind at Zugara when creating ZugSTAR, which streams AR data over a raw video feed to be redisplayed and manipulated on the other end of a video conference.
AR will eventually save lives, but a developer community consistently using it for gimmick purposes only serves to push back that date.
Twitter has been abuzz with the thought of AR contact lenses. They are currently in a long research and development phase at the University of Washington. Is it a far stretch to think that they might get less funding for the project if a large portion of the general populace thinks that AR is a fad?
If you don’t really care, from the bottom of your heart, about this technology, then please let other people develop it. If you do care, then be innovative with your approach. Take the extra time to repeatedly ask yourself, “what can I do to make this better?”
