Designing with and for AR

Writer: Tarun Jakhodia | YUJ Designs

AR for Education

Augmented reality can breathe new life into the classroom, bringing extra creativity, interactivity and engagement to any subject. AR learning helps students by decreasing the time it takes to grasp complex topics. Especially in this new work from home situation

AR in medicine & Healthcare

It’s easy to imagine anything in the medical and anatomy fields implementing and benefiting from augmented and virtual reality. So much so, in fact, that we are already seeing colleges utilizing the tools as they are created.

AR in retail

Retail has suffered tremendously these past few years, which begs the question — what can they do to innovate and improve shopping experiences?

AR provides customers the ability to ‘try before you buy’ which will result in a reduction in churn, one of the major pain points for retailers. 72% of AR users report that they made unplanned purchases because of the AR influence.

I purchased the Ray-Ban glasses that I’ve been wearing for the past 2+ years because I used the Virtual-Try-On feature from the Ray-Ban website.

Whether stores will be able to survive in the long-term, I’m unsure — but the shopping experience in a physical store will be improved tremendously by AR soon.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you’ve just walked into a Target store to buy a new pair of sneakers. If you’re wearing AR contacts, then you’ll be directed to the location where you can view shoes. You’ll then have the ability to see customer reviews, available sizes, colors, styles, etc.

AR doesn’t need to replace retail stores for those who enjoy the pleasure of shopping — it can simply enhance the experience by bridging the gap between online and in-store shopping.

With an AR shopping experience customers no longer have to travel to a store, wait in long lines, search endless aisles looking for the one item they need or receive less information about a product than they would if they shopped online. AR can bring the online world to the physical world.

I can’t wait until I can view all the products I want to buy online using AR.

Hopefully, retailers will prepare for this better than they did for the advent of online shopping. There are plenty of retailers that have successfully implemented this technology already. Alibaba is ahead of the curve with their VR shopping, allowing shoppers in China to browse and buy all over the world.

IKEA’s newest app, IKEA Place, is an augmented reality app that will let people experience, experiment and share how good design transforms any space, such as a home, office, school or studio. Their app matches furniture to your space with 99% accuracy to ensure that it will fit in your place — it’s pretty impressive.

Home Depot’s Project Color app utilizes AR to allow customers to overcome a very frustrating pain point when painting a space — will this look good? Project Color holds the integrity of the room’s dimension and allows you to try different paint colors in their space. Project color paints around objects in the room and acknowledges shadows and lighting conditions in the place, so you get the most real-life visual of how the paint will look.

What if when you checked into an Airbnb, you were equipped with an AR map of the amenities and instructions on how to use them?

AR for utility

Outside of retail, there are endless use cases for implementing AR to improve UX.

I recently discovered AirMeasure, a measuring app that is not only a tape measure but a whole set of tools to let you measure almost anything. Imagine all the time that could be saved with something like this!

AR for workplace

Augmented Reality has the potential to help transition displaced workers who have lost their jobs due to increasing automation. By providing a worker with just-in-time information, AR enables them to perform a variety of tasks that they may have no prior experience with. This allows workers to fluidly move from one type of job to another to maintain a stable income.

Through a combination of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), a large number of jobs may soon go away. A recent McKinsey report states that automation could make up to 45 percent of all jobs in the United States obsolete, potentially affecting $2 trillion in annual wages. Autonomous trucking alone has the potential to automate away 3.5 million driver jobs.

Augmented reality (AR), however, may become the tool that delays this fate by evolving the role of workers in a post-automation world, creating opportunities for continued employment across a more diverse set of occupations. In a scenario where training or technical schools may take too long or may be economically unfeasible in order to change careers as a result of displaced work, AR can enable people to perform unfamiliar and complex tasks. At scale, this can take a displaced workforce and immediately put people back to work performing jobs guided by AR.

AR in Art

In nearly every area of education, creation is taught on the shoulders of the past. Perhaps more than most, the arts, whether it be painting, music, theatre, or writing, find themselves in this position.

Studying “the greats” in any art field is instrumental for learning concepts and honing one’s craft. Whether you’re learning about Van Gogh, studying Beethoven’s creation process, or trying to divine Sylvia Plath’s inspiration, all further the next generation’s creations.

However, it is very difficult to learn about the full scale of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel through books, photos, or even documentaries. Being told the project was an immense effort taking years to tackle, regardless of how many sources agree, is a sad substitute for standing in the space and seeing the immensity for oneself.

Future proofing your design career by learning how to design for the next technology platform, augmented reality, one of the best ways to future proof your career as a designer and increase demand as a designer is to do things that other people are not really learning yet,

Now it’s 2020. It’s actually October almost November 2020, the entire world is on lockdown, everyone’s using zoom and at this moment, Apple and Facebook are both working on next generation mixed reality or AR headsets, you know we already have right now on the market. We have Microsoft HoloLens too and we have the Magic Leap. Those are the two main products out in the market today. But they’re still in the fringes, they’re still not something people are talking about. They’re still very focused on enterprise. But I think over the next five years, when a company like apple, and when a company like Facebook really pushes into this market, we’re going to start seeing a lot more applications for AR first,

I think the first real thing that we’re going to be focusing on is really like this idea of presence, the idea that you can put on the headset, and have the feeling that someone else is in the room with you. Right now I think people are realizing this is something super important. Imagine if we bought or rented 30 headsets for the company and I stood in like a bit of a studio like this. I could give this talk in person (but not). But the people wearing the headset had the feeling I was in the room with them.

I think there’s going to be a massive demand for designers designing interfaces for augmented reality overlay devices, or mixed reality overlay devices.For the enterprise world. And even for concerts, a lot of different applications are going to become a lot more possible and a lot cheaper when companies like Apple and Facebook push for these headsets and this feeling of presence that they’ve been trying to do with VR. But VR is too bulky into claustrophobic and has a lot of issues with motion sickness.

I think that AR is something that a lot of designers are ignoring. They feel like maybe the it’s like a gimmick that’s not going to come back. But I think and I want to also state here that I think AR is going to be absolutely massive over the next five years. And there’s just going to be huge opportunity. So how can you start learning honestly, the easiest thing to do is start googling it right? So Google how to design a or assets, start learning and start trying it out with your phone at pointing to my phone, by the way, you know, you’re gonna have to learn new things, you’re gonna have to learn unity, you might have to learn 3d modeling programs. But I think that’s really interesting, right?

Since the original iPhones launch 13 years ago, a lot of people have been waiting for Apple’s next big product category. Since then, we’ve had the iPad, Apple Watch, and he put these have all sold well, but I think Apple’s next venture into augmented reality might be more interesting. Apple stepping in with a pair of augmented reality glasses may be a game changer.

Apple has been exploring virtual and augmented reality technologies for more than 10 years, the product will look similar to Ray Bans or the glasses that Tim Cook wears. He describes them as unintimidating, afecta, that I think will be very important.

But much of that cost comes from all the electronics needed to run the AR experience being built into the headset itself. On the other hand, Apple glasses are set to be run from the iPhone, much like the first generation Apple Watch, but we’ll get to this later. Each lens is set to have a resolution of 8k, which puts it above most TVs. The release date for the glasses is said to be around 2022.

LIDAR stands for laser imaging. detection and ranging. It uses lasers to scan an environment and visualize distance and the shape of objects is similar to how best to use sound waves to quote see the surroundings. LIDAR sensors are also used in self driving cars. Apple already uses this technology in their latest iPad Pro. In the iPad Pro, the LIDAR scanner is already good enough to create a detailed mesh of its surroundings. It can recognize furniture, people and more. The iPad Pro and the next iPhone could end up acting like a development kit for the glasses senses.

The iPhone already has AI and computer vision computation chips built right in. So it seems like Apple designed these phones with the glasses in mind. offloading all the processing to the iPhone will allow the glasses to remain slim and lightweight. Apple also has plans for third party apps and is considering a dedicated App Store. You could easily imagine navigation software, or the enabling of Home Entertainment on a re scalable virtual TV. According to another patent, the system will be capable of identifying vision problems and automatically adjust the refraction of the displays and lenses to help us to see This eliminates the need to wear prescription lenses beneath the augmented reality device.

Originally published at https://medium.com on December 7, 2020.