The Problem With AR
The popular Netflix show, Black Mirror, provides cautionary tales of emerging technologies and how they can negatively affect society. There are several episodes that depict augmented reality glasses or external devices that trick your brain into seeing things that aren’t actually there. Sometimes they are portrayed as contact lenses, like in The Entire History of You or Nosedive. Other times they directly hack into your brain and alter your perception of reality entirely, like in Playtest. Most of these episodes leave you with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that maybe you should just throw your phone out the window.
Well I am here to tell you that you actually have nothing to worry about, at least when it comes to augmented reality. We are still significantly far off from a world where everyone wears a headset at work or we use it to call our mothers. I would like to shed some light on some breakthroughs that have allowed AR to get where it is today and also talk about the hardships that lie ahead for the AR industry and how far away we are from having AR like in Black Mirror.
A Brief History
You might have heard of Pokémon Go. I can almost guarantee you have heard of it. It was the first game to popularize the concept of AR, and ironically most critics would say the game was barely AR at best because the Pokémon had no spatial awareness. The ones that didn’t have wings would sometimes float in the air. Savvy companies began developing clever tools to solve this spatial awareness problem. Vuforia, for instance, used an inside-out tracking based system utilizing markers that could anchor AR objects to things in the real world when these markers were scanned. Google’s Tango project tried to solve this problem using devices that contained a special depth perception camera that allowed a better understanding of 3D space. Then Apple came along and blew everyone’s mind with ARKit. It finally gave developers a way to utilize spatial and contextual awareness by integrating a simple SDK within their applications. Google answered with the Android-equivalent ARCore, and the AR industry was equipped with everything it needed to finally take off. Taking all of this into account, marketing company, Digi-Capital, released a prediction that almost a billion devices will be AR enabled and mobile AR market share revenue will shoot up to $60 billion by 2021. Wow! That’s something else.
Where are all the AR apps?
It’s been 6 months now since ARKit has been released, and the App Store has a little more than 2000 AR enabled apps. The number of app downloads has dipped precipitously since September 2017 and last month only 170 apps were made that use ARKit. What is going on? Where is all the content?
To find out what’s happening I’d like to look back to the same events that occurred when the Oculus Rift brought VR back into the spotlight after so many years in hiding. Facebook’s $2 billion acquisition of Oculus raised a lot of hype in the VR world. The markets were predicting that VR would be a household item by 2017 and you would use it normally for watching Netflix shows and playing totally immersive games.
What actually happened was that the high price of the headsets and their supporting computers proved to be a high barrier-to-entry and playing a game one time was pretty awesome but couldn’t justify itself being used every day for more than 1 hour at a time. The same thing happened when Apple debuted ARKit. Everyone had high hopes for the future, a big name company had come forward saying it was going to change the future, and AR was going to be the next big thing. You bought an AR experience or you downloaded an AR app, played it one time and totally forgot it was there. Let’s admit it, it’s just not that fun yet! Why is that?
How do we make AR fun?
I think I have a hunch. The AR industry is in a state of confusion because of two prevalent problems associated with AR in its current form. The first problem has to do with persisting a multiplayer-like environment within a game that can handle several users at once. To more technically inclined people within the space, this has been referred to as the AR Cloud. The AR Cloud will be great because it will allow you to finally team up with your friends within AR worlds. For example, if you hold up your phone and you see a zombie coming towards you with arms stretched out, your friend may point his phone in your direction and shoot it before it gets to you.
The other problem has to do with actually viewing the content. Every giant tech company is building THE elusive AR headset. For goodness sake, Magic Leap has raised almost $2 billion in funding just to build one. It’s really easy to find that holding out your phone like a magnifying glass every time you want to play an AR game gets to be really annoying. First off, you have to look through the phone to actually see what it is you are trying to see. Secondly, you have to awkwardly hold it up, as if you were about to take a photo of someone that isn’t even there. And finally, which I find to be the reason why most of the games aren’t that interesting so far, is because the only way to interact with the game is to tap on the screen. You want to shoot a zombie? Tap on the screen. You want to detonate a bomb at the enemy robot laboratory? Tap on the screen. You want to catch a Pokémon? Okay this time you have to swipe up, but you get the point.
Taking all of this consideration, and putting this into my magical forecast prediction algorithm, I’d say that…… we are about 5 years away before we are all wearing AR headsets and all of these problems are solved.
Surprised? Confused? 5 years not long enough for you? I’m sorry, but the magical forecast prediction algorithm never lies. Might as well enjoy our time before we are all doomed to watching Black Mirror through glasses.
