Trends in the Valley: Augmented reality
In this second post of the Trends in the Valley series, I look at augmented reality. You can read my first post about personalisation here.
Ask about the future of AR and it’s difficult not to focus on Google Glass, one of the company’s most high-profile failures.
A hefty price tag ($1500) together with security and privacy concerns severely limited its commercial and cultural impact when it launched in 2014, and was quietly shelved less than a year later. It was also too ‘in your face’, figuratively and literally; it took a step too far — and soon — in asking consumers to embrace AR as a constant feature of their daily experience, and as a very obvious addition to their appearance.
We’re still waiting for a successor to Glass that solves its many problems, whether from Google or any of the other tech giants at play (e.g. Microsoft’s HoloLens, Intel’s Vaunt or Apple’s inevitable ‘iGlass’). On this basis, it’s tempting to think AR remains in its infancy and we should just check back in a couple of years.
Yet AR has still made significant advancements in technology, commercial viability and public perception since the fall of Glass— albeit in a subtler and outwardly less impressive form.
AR in the palm of our hands
Pokémon Go might just seem like a game, or Snapchat filters just social media gimmicks.
The reality is that these two examples of immensely popular apps have actually helped to normalise AR for millions of people. Consider the relative social acceptability of someone wandering the streets searching for virtual Pokémon, or the now default use of filters to enhance how we look, as compared with those cases of Glass users getting chucked out of restaurants.
Whereas Glass was too intrusive, Pokémon Go, Snapchat and other related apps rely on devices with which we are already familiar and comfortable using in public, on a daily basis. In this sense, AR’s future is now.
A testament to this potential is last year’s release of Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore (development toolkits for iOS and Android operating systems respectively); these might not have grabbed as many headlines as Glass, but I’d argue they’ll make far more accessible and pronounced gains in AR in the coming years.
Putting the AR in art
Whatever its implementation, I think AR is particularly exciting for the art world because of the strong links between the two; not only as both are a fundamentally visual experience, but also because both aim to enhance or alter our perception of reality.
There have already been some intriguing executions in the arts space: Snapchat collaborated with Jeff Koons last year on a project allowing users to ‘see’ one of his works at geocached locations using their smartphones; with Artopia, AR is a means to create 3D art and pin it to specific GPS coordinates for others to find and adapt; and Art.com’s app recently introduced ‘ArtView’, functionality enabling users to visualise paintings on their smartphones — at an accurate size — on their walls before purchase.
What’s more, galleries and museums are obvious homes for AR: imagine a visual accompaniment to audio guides that can pick out key details in works and provide additional context and history.
As AR develops beyond our smartphones and tablets — however long that might take — I think art will be very well placed to provide test use cases and content.
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