Augmented Reality glasses will fail without content infrastructure

Enterprise and consumer interest into AR glasses and heads up displays are booming. This is fantastic for the future of computing — but is crowding out investments in application and content infrastructure.

Applications drive adoption

If you look at the history of any major new computing technology, widespread adoption always happened after applications and content became available that proved the value of the technology to the average user. Technologists refer to these applications and content as “killer applications” and they drive technologies to cross the boundary between hobby users and wide scale adoption.

As an example, the personal computer didn’t seriously take off until breakthrough applications such as VisiCalc (Visidraft is a homage to that name by the way) and Wordperfect proved the value of the platform for the enterprise. These functional applications, with improved user interfaces, proved valuable to consumers and as a result became more broadly adopted.

Similarly, it wasn’t until the mobile application infrastructure boomed with app stores that the value of having computers in a compact mobile form was recognized. One would be hard-pressed to find a single killer app for smartphones but I would venture a guess that it was a tossup between robust email/messaging with Blackberry (again, originally adopted primarily by enterprise) and the camera integration with the iPhone which drove wider consumer adoption. The deluge of productivity/connectivity applications, like maps, added fuel to that fire.

How AR content is delivered

The theoretical use cases of Augmented Reality technologies dwarf the use cases of pretty much all previous computing interfaces. At one extreme, we have a simple 2D overlay of information in our line of sight similar to what google glass delivered. At the other extreme is virtual elements convincingly embedded into our real environment through a “hands free” visual interface.

Regardless of where your content lies on this spectrum, the one thing all have in common is that the content should be responsive to the real environment in which you exist. That is to say, content should seamlessly add value to your visual landscape by overlaying or embedding content that would otherwise not be accessible.

To do this, content needs to be tied or linked to the environment in a way that is simple for users. The most utilized process for this real-virtual link to date has been with AR Markers, printed images which are linked to 3D content which “pop out” of the environment. The most successful AR companies have exploited this mechanism through print advertising, giving additional interactivity to print advertising.

For AR to be widely adopted however, there needs to be a content infrastructure that provides users with real added value — something that makes their lives easier or better, like local data, object recognition or navigation through a dead simple interface. For complex 3D and locational data, we can’t expect users to generate this content on their own, so it is up to developers and companies to build this out for them.

This content must be “pulled” from the environment for the user interface to work — we cannot rely on end users to place their own virtual elements in the environment. That would be backwards. This is where the marker based approach that is so common fails, as plastering the world with images is neither practical nor desirable.

Putting the interface before the applications

To do what is described above however, needs robust markerless AR technology. To date, investment in markerless AR has been sparse and limited to companies already well established in the AR market or in government laboratories. Prior to their recent acquisition by Apple, Metaio had been developing a few markerless AR approaches which allowed for embedding content to 3D maps of environmental objects — a great development which is no longer available to developers.

Markerless AR with the ability to draw data from the existing environment is the only realistic way to bring content to users in a seamless and simple fashion. The content and application infrastructure then is the software, and to some degree hardware, that makes Markerless AR “just work.” These are techniques that lie in the computer vision and deep learning world devoted to understanding the world visually: SLAM, PTAM, Semantic object recognition, etc…that see the bulk of their research coming from universities and larger corporate labs. Largely though, companies investing in these approaches are applying them to self-driving cars, robotics and other autonomous navigation problems, not to the AR content infrastructure problem.

The content and application infrastructure then, is the software, and to some degree hardware, that makes Markerless AR “just work.”

The hardware to support this middle layer is already available. Tablets and smartphones can already support what is needed to make these interactions possible. At Visidraft, we are proving that you can run real time monocular SLAM to build dense geo-rectified point clouds from mobile devices already. These devices are the natural stepping stone to better glasses, especially considering that these devices are still relatively new, having only seen market dominance for less than a decade. Even then, many of the AR glasses on the market can support this content infrastructure. Critically the markerless AR tracking and content creation that would give these devices breakthrough experiences have not seen significant investment.

The current glut of investment in AR is ignoring this critical middle layer and focusing on making better display technologies.

Towards building a robust AR content infrastructure

Building the markerless AR content and application infrastructure that just works right out of the box is really hard. Exceptionally hard actually, and needs capital and investments at the level the AR hardware is seeing. Without this layer, all the advances in hardware won’t be able to bridge the user experience needed for broad adoption of AR.

Investors and companies interested in AR should be taking much more interest in developing the content infrastructure of AR through markerless AR, and divest in the hardware for the time being. Making AR widespread is as much an educational exercise for users and consumers as it is a technological problem. We have the hardware and use cases today to start bridging those gaps with unique and compelling applications. As users demand more AR in their world, the demand for better wearable AR devices will grow, and the transition from phones/tablets to glasses will be that much more seamless.

Andrew Kemendo (@AndrewKemendo) is the founder and CEO of Pair.