The future of Augmented Reality
So, assuming someone uses an application for knowing the names of some art pieces in a museum, if she wants to see where she has left her car, to leave a message for her boyfriend, or translated a written text, she will have most probably to change application: so she would need to put the museum AR application in background and open the relative applications that, most notably, shows exactly the same reality but puts different artifact and controls over it.
It is like we needed to change our car every time we move in another city!
What is interesting in this regard is that, for a time, Apple has been slower than its developers in providing tools for tackling a given technology. So, to this time, all developers that want to employ augmented reality in their applications, have to customize a tool that was made primarily for taking pictures or selecting photos! The effect is that the default implementation of some obvious behaviors, like turning the iPhone, totally miss the point by forcing the developer to choose not to have rotation or to have the “reality” turn with the controls, unless she commits in a lot of non standard coding, especially if the artifacts are richer than those of the built in camera application.
Please check this against what Apple did with a different sector and Game Centre.
For what is known to the author, the situation is not much better in other platforms; actually complicating the issue somewhat. As a matter of fact, if two different functionalities were just available on a single platform, that would mean for the user to even use two devices to put controls over the same reality!
The point of this article is that this situation is going to change and will make the fortune or the failure of the frameworks that will develop it early or too late.
What we are talking of is, of course, the development of a common augmented reality centre to which, at least the developers for a single platform, would hook their applications: much as nowaday happens with Facebook or Twitter.
The benefits would be innumerable for the device seller, the developers, and the users.
The first ones would put themselves in a very distinctive advantage over their competitors by offering this integration. The developers would find the “world” ready for them to add controls, so streamlining the development and not forcing them to reinvent the wheel, finally the user would have just to open their augmented reality background to have all the installed applications provide their content when needed without having to select the applications themselves like today.
So the user of the example would simply push the screen to insert a message, select a text to have it translated or scroll the screen to know the position of her house.
Of course that would be just the beginning, as even the reproduction of reality is meaningless, given we may see it with our own eyes without the smart phone camera.
So the natural development will be glasses, or other viewing devices, that will connect to the smart phone to receive the artifacts to superimpose to the view. So we will walk in a city and see all writings with subtitles in our language, an arrow in the sky over the position of our car, and, perhaps, hovering messages from our spouse telling us to buy milk.
As usual we cannot expect a single technology to emerge, but we hope there will be some standards that will ease the life of the users. We might in fact expect several technologies that will compete on the presentation of the applications and/or on the number of supported applications by offering free and paid services. In this phase the glasses will have a sort of tuner that will allow the user to change augmented reality framework the way it is done today with phone sim cards, or add a card to enable premium services as we do now with television channels.
This would make normal advertisement meaningless as those devices would mask with a water-fall or other beautiful view all uninteresting objects much as today the anti-spam messages do with email. On the reverse the operators will start to put into effect marketing operations to convince people to install applications that will support their business.
The effect on our reality will be huge: when we will remove our glasses, assuming we ever want to do that, the world will be just trees and nature, no advertisements or other physical tags to pollute the environment even in the centre of a big city; then we will wear our glasses and Times Square will return with all its lights and attractions.
We might wander if this development will make us more free or will enslave us even more than today.
This is a technical article and so we will not give any answer.