First check out the video in this tweet:
The concept is familiar, a business card, a real world object, that expands when seen through an augmented reality lens, tracking to the original object, but adding views and controls that enhance the original object.
To me, there’s no question that this approach has tremendous potential. Imagine picking up an item in the grocery store and having a pane appear with buttons like “find best value” or “find cheapest” and having arrows appear on nearby shelves marked with appropriate alternatives.
Or a “convert” button that translates the price into a common format. For example, if you buy paper towels, it might show you cents per foot, so you can compare differently priced products, which range from $/roll to $/package to cents/sheet (with different sheet sizes).
I can definitely see the advantage of wearing a pair of glasses when immersed in an AR environment. It would get old constantly having to hold my phone up as a lens as I walk through a store. I wear glasses, so it’d be interesting to see how Apple will deal with the corrective lens issue. Will we someday see AR glasses that automatically correct my vision as well as offering an AR overlay?
It’d be nice if this tech gets used mostly for genuine information, but we know which sector will pollute it with intrusive, ubiquitous messaging.
We’ve already seen the video where the grocery store (and indeed everywhere else) inundates the user with ads, purchase incentives, and mandatory participation in CRM games.
Everything with AR is going to hinge on usability. Controlling how and when information is presented to you. While having things come up automatically would be convenient, but could also be overwhelming. How do you get the tech to provide you with only the information you want without adding extra input that removes the convenience? I will be interested to see how AR evolves to solve problems.
Dealing with people that wear glasses is always high on my list, since I’m yet another person that wears glasses (Tim Cook is another example). For a short time at movie theaters they had 3D glasses for people, and big ones for “people who needed glasses.” I hope they can deal with the issue in a more reasonable way.
As for these awesome twenty second twitter posts…I got so excited after ARKit 1 tweets showed some things, but nothing really useful ever seemed to appear. Will ARKit 2 apps become meaningful in life, or just fade away once again?