Augmented reality is the craze. Or at least, it should have been. It had certainly made its milestones and headlines, and there have been a few practical applications here and there, the most popular of which is something that involves catching cutesy critters.
However, through the first decade of its existence, it never integrated itself deeply enough into our lives. No fantastic beasts on tabletops. No digital signs floating on streets. No mixed reality offices.
Cost and implementation are the obvious reasons. But there are also relatively minor reasons. These secondary factors all add up to slow down, or even outright halt the progress of AR technology’s transition into our think desks.
1. The elusive killer app
Yes, this issue has been mentioned and reiterated countless times over the past few years. Yet it still rings true today. Augmented reality unfortunately still lacks a killer app, or its own version of Visicalc or Google.com, that is universal and potentially ubiquitous enough that everyone would want or need to use it.
To be fair, a good number of its most touted applications lean towards the productivity side. However each of them caters to some specific task, usually something that is already adequately doable on another popular type of mobile device (hint: it’s long and flat).
Something like a true AR optimized operating system should be a good start. But then such OS would only be truly optimized for...
2. Dedicated dilemma
Augmented reality today exists in two primary flavors: a dedicated wearable, and a hard slate window, also known as a smartphone screen + camera. Tapping on a window you have to constantly point around isn’t exactly virtual office material, and neither does chucking it in front of your eyes like a makeshift VR device.
This is why a dedicated headset or eyewear for AR would be better to use for an operating system designed to optimize its best features. The access method is intuitive: the headset is basically your eyeglass, and you interact directly with your hands in the air.
The problem, is that those headsets don’t actually exist yet as a ground consumer level product. That is, the products still sit a good distance away from their finalized versions, and the dev kit price points are simply beyond economically practical for the average user.
Microsoft HoloLens, for instance, is still introduced at $3,000 minimum. It still has the tiny, tiny field of view (FOV) of 35 degrees, or a square hole less than half the size of the screen lenses. Not exactly your ideal mixed reality office experience.
Meta, the ambitious startup company that has actually ditched office monitors in favor of AR headsets, still has issues with Meta 2's seamless control experience, often with somewhat weird results whenever its apps glitches you out from your immersion.
It doesn’t help that all the other competing AR headsets weigh over a pound and has a form factor that’s not really so subtle. Magic Leap is determined to fix both of these problems. But the Creator Edition just arrived last August 2018, a full six years after it was first revealed, and is currently priced at over $2,000.
3. Build now, or develop first
The wait calculation is a classic problem that involves determining if it is more efficient to just walk to your destination, or waste time and wait for the bus to arrive.
The same is roughly applicable to augmented reality. Do you forcibly implement the technology now as is? Or instead of immediately building systems and infrastructure for it, you wait for the hardware to get more advanced first?
True, both can be done at the same time. But the transition from one hardware iteration to the next as it gets better is something that a newfangled technology such as AR cannot afford to do just yet. It is unlike touchscreen technology, which already had its roots in the 1980s, and eventually became practically feasible with the arrival of the iPhone in 2006.
For now AR is currently on a focused path of development, a conscious decision to “wait for the bus first”. Mass market adoption of its ideal form, the wearable type, is not expected to occur until we finally get the combination of needed hardware and software just right.
4. (Lack of) Concept critical mass
More devices, more ideas. That is the concept proven by the complete proliferation of smartphones and tablets in our modern world. The logic is deviously simple.
Because there are more users, there are more brains to think of more uses for the device. This in turn makes the device even more useful, thus opening it to even more users.
AR too, can benefit from such experience, with all the promise of floating productivity apps. But it must reach the masses first. It should be widely available to everyone in any method or way possible. Cost and implementation takes direct influence here, though other availability diffusion ideas are always welcome.
One such example is the low-cost, DIY, and open source AR headset project of Leap Motion: Project North Star. Its schematics are free for anyone to download, the API is also free to use, and the materials for its construction are expected to cost only around $100.
It's not as perfect as HoloLens or Meta of course, but with a tenth of the cost of its equivalent dev kit counterparts, it might just take AR into concept critical mass in the near future.
5. More invasive than pervasive
Finally, there is the understandably rational fear that augmented reality might simply overload our visual and audio senses. We ourselves can barely keep up with the vast amounts of information our digital age generates. How would you actually interact and function in world completely enveloped by another layer of reality beyond your headset screen?
Such is the imagined future of Keiichi Matsuda, in his creative presentation named Hyper Reality. This seemingly ideal world is completely filled with all the “augmentations” AR could possibly provide.
It saturates our reality so much, it almost makes the actual world utterly bland and boring in comparison. The convenience of automated payment, food labels, interactive notifications, even the scare of a digital security breach, are vividly presented here, in its full mixed reality glory.
If this is to be the intended end line for AR, then it may actually be more of a dystopian thought than a harmless floating word processor. It could be something that we would most likely not want to invade our traditional offices with after all.
Photo by David Grandmougin on Unsplash.
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