By Alex Hertel & Philipp Hertel, Ph.D., Co-Founders of Xperiel
There’s an adage common among military historians that armies have a tendency to “fight the previous war”. For instance, one reason why the Allies had their hands full with the Axis early in WWII was precisely because they were initially fighting using the tactics of WWI even though new technology had evolved to make those techniques totally obsolete. There are certainly lessons to be learned here for generals.
But really this principle is applicable whenever new technology is invented. We humans seem to fall into this trap all the time, and our digital technology is no exception — indeed, it might even be fair to say that that our “fighting the previous war” concept applies even more aptly to high tech than it does to warfare.
For example, consider television advertising. Early t.v. ads didn’t use video, even though it was available — instead, they only contained words. The reason for this was because when t.v. was invented, there were no t.v. ad experts, so we instinctively ran to our comfort zone and copied the types of ads that we were running on yesterday’s hardware, the radio. The only tool that radio advertisers had was words, so we just went ahead and fought the previous war by putting those words up on the t.v. without any moving pictures, completely underutilizing the native powers of this new medium. Eventually we figured out that we shouldn’t just use television as a radio simulator — rather than just talking about a refrigerator we want to sell on t.v., we should also show it, and only then did this new advertising medium finally surpass radio’s powers.
The important point here is that our first attempts at t.v. advertising were to run ads native to radio on them. We were running “software” native to the radio on more powerful hardware, and it took us a while to figure out how to create “software” to properly take advantage of the t.v.’s new powers.
Unfortunately, history repeated itself with a vengeance in the world of digital advertising. The birth of the web saw the creation of pop-ups and banner ads, which are essentially just the same types of ads that we’ve been putting into magazines for the past century. To this day we continue to fight the previous war by running “software” native to magazines on computers which really should have made it possible to do something far more engaging.
However, this pales in comparison to the lack of innovation that we saw when mobile advertising was born because instead of taking advantage of our new native mobile powers, we just went and recycled our online banner ad technology. Once again, we retreated to our comfort zone and fought the previous war, choosing to take our web 1.0 adtech that everyone hated back in 1998 and shoehorned it into a smaller form factor where it made even less sense. By running software native to print on the web, and then running that on next-generation mobile hardware, we’re doing exactly the same thing that the radio ad experts did with televisions when they first came out — we’re foolishly and voluntarily choosing not to use the mobile hardware’s additional powers such as sensors that can produce truly mobile interactions with the real world. As a result, our mobile advertising isn’t actually mobile — it’s like someone fooled us into calling it mobile and for some reason nobody ever noticed!
That being said, mobile advertisers shouldn’t feel too badly because they’re certainly not alone. The vast majority of mobile apps are fundamentally native to the web and PC. They were created using a mindset stuck in cyberspace and on desktops, without any attempt to take advantage of the native physicality and mobility of the new hardware. People seem to think that if you make a piece of software fit a smaller screen, then it’s mobile, but that’s simply not enough. Only a small number — Pokemon Go, Uber, Starbucks, and Google Maps, to name a few — are properly native to mobile and were designed using a mindset that moved away from cyberspace to do something much more interesting and interactive in the real world. Almost 10 years after smartphones were invented, virtually all developers are treating smartphones as PC or web simulators. We still live in a world where true mobile advertising doesn’t yet exist (at least at scale), and there’s still very little truly mobile software available.
Sometimes we get it totally wrong: For instance, mobile web apps are a naked and transparent use of mobile hardware as a web simulator. Other times we get it half right: For example, consider QR codes, which allow us to use the cameras in our mobile devices as sensors to interact with the physical world. This is an amazingly powerful idea because we can now take virtually any product or ad format and make it digitally interactive. QR codes get full marks for being a truly mobile technology. Sadly, we dropped the ball on what we then did with those QR codes, and reverted back to our comfort zones by just using them to encode simple web URLs. So although we had the power to make anything digitally interactive through our smartphones, all we did with that was take the user to a website to visit the previous war.
Our software seems to always lag behind our hardware, and projecting this trend into the future, it’s not hard to imagine what’s going to happen as we perfect our next major leap forward: augmented reality wearables. Just picture it: you’ve got a pair of augmented reality glasses which are capable of overlaying digital graphics and interactions on the real world. They work amazingly well and there are a few examples of really cool AR software experiences that make full use of the hardware’s innate native powers. Unfortunately, at least if history is any guide, the vast majority of software developers aren’t going to get it, and they’ll just continue to fight the previous war, choosing instead to let the new AR hardware simply simulate the previous generation of mobile technology.
Consider how amazing an AR version of Google Maps’ navigation feature could be. Instead of looking down at a screen in your hand to guide you turn-by-turn, the AR hardware will be capable of overlaying the direction arrows right on the sidewalk ahead of you to lead to your destination. Now consider how easy it’ll be for developers to get this wrong and fall into the trap. The overwhelming temptation will be to take the Google Maps screen and just translate it verbatim over into AR so that it’s floating in front of you. It’ll still be AR, but not *native* AR — instead of really making the world digitally interactive, developers will just use AR as a glorified screen. It’ll be very easy to take a previous mobile app and just present it a couple of feet in front of the user, and that’s what many developers will do. It’ll still be kinda AR in the same way that mobile advertising is kinda mobile, but it’ll sell the new hardware way short just like early text-based t.v. ads did.
We’re here to solve this problem. Xperiel has built what we call our Real World Web (RWW) platform, which is specifically designed to make it much faster, cheaper, and easier for anyone to create mobile apps that are natively mobile and make the real world digitally interactive. Our goal is to provide the tools and technology to make native mobile powers broadly available, and we’ve taken this goal to the extreme by creating a platform which even non-technical creative people such as designers and marketers can use to build powerful, custom software without the need to hire software engineers. Instead of building yesterday’s software, our RWW platform allows you to create mobile apps for any device that are capable of interacting with the physical world through the use of sensors and by interacting with IoT technology in the environment.
As soon as great AR wearables are developed, we’ll be ready and our RWW platform will make it easy to create many great AR apps that take advantage of its native powers on day one. We’ve already missed the boat on doing mobile right from the get-go, but when AR hardware is mature, let’s be ready. It’s time to stop fighting the previous war and to fully embrace new hardware powers as soon as they become available. Our software has to stop lagging behind our hardware and we have to make sure that great native content is available at scale as soon as it can be supported.
