Augmented Reality Check
The State and Potential of Augmented Reality
By Steve Penhollow
A good advertising slogan for augmented reality might be “Augmented reality — it’s not just for robots, cyborgs and space aliens who want to kill all humans anymore.”
Perhaps it’s a good thing I don’t work in PR for augmented reality.
It cannot be denied, however, that most of what many of us know or think we know about augmented reality came to us via the sort of movies that rarely win significant Oscars.
Smartphones and tablets are to AR what penny arcade movie machines were to cinema: a first step.
For decades, science-fiction series involving characters such as Predator, Terminator and RoboCop have amply prognosticated that futuristic technology will allow evil interstellar critters to receive heads-up visual information in their visors or on their robotic retinas and that this information will have a single purpose: increasing efficiency and productivity in the endeavor of killing all humans.
Of course, in the real world, most people don’t use AR for that purpose — or if they do, I don’t want to know about it.
During the rise of the personal computer in the ’80s and ’90s, people and pundits liked to imagine that the next step was virtual reality — humans interacting with wholly fabricated environments, usually by way of bulky headgear and cumbersome gloves.
Virtual reality is being very much kept alive by Oculus Rift, a system that has not yet been made available to consumers.
But augmented reality might be the more useful of the two concepts.
AR doesn’t aim to block your view of the real world, just enhance it with visual information that overlaps and complements actual happenings as seen through goggles and glasses, or on the screens of smartphones and tablets.
The plain truth about AR hardware is that the best is still to come. Even Google Glass, Google’s much-vaunted wearable, does not quite fill the definition or fulfill the aims of augmented reality, as Anand Dibble pointed out on the Brainberry Global blog.
“The difference here is that the information Glass displays is not necessarily related to what is in front of you,” he wrote, “and as such does not augment what you are seeing so much as it serves as a companion device to a smartphone.”
Small windows will have to suffice until bigger windows open.
This brings up a common confusion about augmented reality (so common it is often evidenced by bloggers mistakenly touting assumed augmented-reality experiences): Assisted is not the same as augmented.
For example, scanning or snapping the label on a bottle of ketchup with your smartphone and being sent (or sent to) pages of ketchupy recipes does not augment anyone’s reality, not even the reality of someone who really, really likes ketchup.
True augmented reality involves information-dense but not obstructive digital displays overlapping, interacting with and reacting to physical objects in the hardware’s (and the hardware user’s) field of vision.
Dibble went on to chart 11 promising wearables in his post but noted significant hurdles in each instance: some have notable design flaws, others are still mere prototypes and most are prohibitively expensive.
Both hardware and software need to improve before augmented reality becomes the only reality.
Britton Marketing & Design took at look at the state of wearable tech in a December 2014 blog post.
For the time being, augmented reality will just have to be a smartphone- and tablet-based experience.
Alas, augmenting reality via smartphone or tablet just “isn’t very compelling,” as Andrew Maimone, a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Simon Parkin at the MIT Technology Review website.
“The experience doesn’t occur in one’s own vision,” Maimone said. “It acts as a little more than a small window into the virtual place.”
Smartphones and tablets are to AR what penny arcade movie machines were to cinema: a first step. Small windows will have to suffice until bigger windows open.
Online lists of the best AR apps for smartphones and tablets often contain one citation (or more) devoted to an app that hews closer to plain ole reality than it does to augmented reality.
But a digital slide show devoted to the concept from Daniel Ionescu and posted on the PC World website has the augmented goods.
It includes kudos paid to Theodolite, a rather extraordinary AR viewfinder for sportsmen and sportswomen that combines such useful tools as a compass, GPS, rangefinder and two-axis inclinometer; Acrossair, a superlative AR browser; and SnapShop Showroom, an app that allows users to see what not-yet-purchased furniture would look like in their living spaces (IKEA also offers a catalog app that allows browsers to do the same thing).
The “Best Augmented Reality Apps” list at Ranker includes Word Lens, an AR translation app that superimposes the translation over the original text; Augment, which allows marketers and product developers to share 3-D models of unreleased products and packages, and see them in the actual settings where they may one day be used and purchased; and AR Dinopark, an app that not only provides information about dinosaurs but also plops a few lively ones down into real-world environments.
Still, the “really compelling applications that are going to make AR take off just haven’t been built yet,” Vanderbilt University computer science professor Jules White told Simon Hill of the Digital Trends website in March 2014.
According to a blog post on the Total Immersion website, the future of AR has enormous implications for e-commerce (virtual product sampling), marketing (games that add brand value), geolocation (enhanced maps), educational resources (classroom materials that come alive with 3-D graphics) and medical applications (apps that assist surgeons).
An Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers paper cited by Hill and called “Next-Generation Augmented Reality Browsers: Rich, Seamless, and Adaptive” suggests that “for AR to hit the mainstream it needs to be easier to register points of interest. Content needs to move beyond static images/text to video, audio, and even 3-D models and animations, and we need better user interfaces to help us interact and extract useful information.”
In short, both hardware and software need to improve before augmented reality becomes the only reality.
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Steve Penhollow
Freelance Writer
BMDG
Photos: Shutterstock
