You’re Giving Augmented Reality a Bad Name
Over at Hammer & Tusk, we’ve been known to complain about people trying to use the latest buzzword to describe their product, and instead watering down the pool for everyone else. Every brand that calls its 360 video a “VR experience” makes uninformed consumers think that’s all that VR can be (and thus they’re less likely to seek out the real thing, not knowing any difference). We’ve said the same about mobile VR, which while actually virtual reality (unlike 360 video), still provides an inferior experience that is liable to sour expectations. Now we have our sights set on the latest perpetrator of this calamitous crime: augmented reality.
Augmented reality as a term has been stretched so badly that Microsoft invented an entirely new term to get away from it. Here’s the thing, people. Turning on your phone’s camera so that you have a real-time video background instead of a blank image background does not make your game augmented reality! Yes, this means that the most famous modern example of AR (Pokemon Go) isn’t actually AR. We will defend that position to the grave.
What, in our minds, is the missing piece that’s required before you can call something AR? Image recognition. You can’t just layer something on top of a photo and call it augmented reality. All of those pictures you photoshopped in high school of yourself holding an Oscar? Not augmented reality. That time you transformed yourself from the pimply kid from the Simpsons into Marlon Brando? Not augmented reality. So why do we suddenly think that doing the same thing with video magically transforms video editing into augmented reality? Because PR machines have told us so.
But wait! we hear you clamoring. What about Snapchat? They’re famously an AR company, and all they do is photo and video editing, isn’t it? No. Not it is not. Because of that magical differentiator, image recognition. If all Snapchat did was put a rainbow in the image you were taking, it wouldn’t be augmented reality. But their filters are smart. They can track your eyes, your face, and your mouth opening and closing, and then they can adjust that photo, augment what’s already there. (See what we did there?) A filter that makes you green isn’t augmented reality, but a filter that makes your eyes green, and vanishes when you blink, and grows when your pupils get bigger if you shine a light on them, is.
We don’t expect every AR app to be busting out Project Tango. We get it — 3D mapping is still hard. It requires software (and occasionally hardware) that most phones don’t yet have. That technology is coming, thanks to the aforementioned Google project, and Apple’s new and already desperately exciting ARKit, but in the meantime developers have to work with limited capability.
And AR sells. It’s new, it’s exciting, and people want it. But calling Pokemon (or the hundreds of clones it inspired) augmented reality just makes people think that’s all it’s capable of. It means they won’t be excited when you offer them an alternative that can really do what it promises. Something smart, that can recognize objects and interact with them in three dimensions. Something that really augments the world of its users. Something deserving of the name augmented reality.
That something is coming. Let’s not poison the water before it arrives.
written by Wren Handman for www.hammerandtusk.com.
