Thanks for the article, great read!
It’s frustrating that a lot of phone-based AR doesn’t work in low-light conditions. It’s limiting that a 3000$ Dev Edition Hololens doesn’t have an immersive field of view, can’t show black, or handle opacity well.
However the most popular applications of AR (such as Snapchat’s filters and lenses, or Pokemon Go) have the consistency you mention, and they do that by simply managing expectations. If you limit what you have an innovation such as AR do you can focus on making it shine.
I’ve been working on a considerable amount of AR applications, mostly in the enterprise realm, and it holds truth there as well. For some specific usecases AR offers an incredible boost in productivity, fault reduction, and worker satisfaction. It’s simply about finding the right usecase. And using future innovations to expand it.
AR is rapidly maturing. Google Tango and Apple’s ARKit are deeply impressive, and the next wave of AR wearables will be a giant leap for AR-kind. If the tech industry focuses on what current technology does consistently well, rather than overpromising and ultimately disappointing consumers (90’s VR boom, anyone?) I think we’ll start seeing the magic we desire a lot sooner than we’d expect.
