The AR Cloud is the next step in Mixed Reality
On February 29th, 2016, I received an email that changed my life. This sounds like a really bold statement, but it’s completely true. The email that I received was from Microsoft, and it was letting me know that I was selected to be one of the first developers in the world to receive the new Microsoft HoloLens.
I didn’t yet know just how life changing that email would be. I wouldn’t actually find out for a couple months. The HoloLens is such a radical change in how we use technology, it’s almost hard to understand until you have actually put one on, and experienced how your mind actually can believe that the digital objects that are placed in your real world are actually there.
I think the first time this really set in was a simple application that let me fly a digital model helicopter around my office. After a few minutes of flying it around, I realized I was avoiding real physical objects in my environment with the digital helicopter. Had I run it into a cubicle wall, nothing would have happened to it. It wouldn’t break, I wouldn’t have to pay to replace it, I wouldn’t have to fix anything. But to my brain, that helicopter was every bit as real as the cubicle walls I was avoiding. This is the kind of thing that you experience after a short while using the HoloLens.
The second stage of realization is when you start thinking of all the uses for it in your everyday life. I can watch Netflix on a screen hovering over the sink while I wash dishes. I can scroll through my Twitter feed without it taking up any space on my actual computer screen. I can have 4 computer screens instead of two physical monitors.
The next stage of realization that happens is actually somewhat disappointing. It’s the realization that all of this amazing technology, while allowing you to escape the prison that is your screens, is still not something that is easily shared. As a matter of fact, it’s harder to share it than if you were using a traditional screen.
Recently there have been a couple articles that have talked about the solution to this problem. ARKit and ARCore will not usher massive adoption of mobile AR by Ori Inbar talks about it, and brings about this idea of the AR Cloud. The AR Cloud is essentially a mirrored digitally mapped version of the world, in which our devices, regardless of platform, can quickly understand where in the world they are, and therefor also display shared digital objects within that world across devices. In Why will AR Apps struggle for engagement without ARCloud? by Matt Miesnieks the concept is taken a step further, with the idea that these devices in the future will need to understand three things in order for them to be effective. They need to understand the world around them (Mapping), the objects around them, and the actions that can be taken in the world.
This is not a problem that is going to be solved all at once. It’s an incredibly large and complicated problem. But it’s solvable. The key to solving it is to crowdsource the data. Let users build the digital copy of the world, and reward them for doing so. Make it fun, make it exciting. Most of all, make it compelling.
I could make this story another 30 minutes longer diving into what the possibilities are when the AR Cloud is in place, but I think it’s best to leave those for a separate story.
If you are interested in how Practical is working to build the AR Cloud, I would first encourage you to visit prax.practicalvr.com and sign up for our mailing list. Second, please, join our community on Discord (join here), and feel free to chat me up. I am more than willing to discuss how we are building the future of AR.
