Since posting a round-up of current AR projects the other day, I’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback and engaged in a fair bit of discussion about the subject — apparently it’s a pretty hot topic.
Specifically two interesting projects have come to my attention, and they couldn’t be more different.
Practical Post
So far most AR I’ve been able to find has either been in the alpha stage, or pure gimmickry. So it was refreshing to find something that is practical and useful to average folks, right now, today. It’s not a game changer and it doesn’t redefine any paradigms, but if you need to know if your stuff will fit in a postal box without going down to the post office, this could be extremely handy. [Found on core77]
Finnish Fluff
If Nokia Research had set out to make a video demonstrating how augmented reality could one day become barely more useful than my iPhone, they couldn’t have done better than this concept video. Unfortunately, I think they really mean it. [Thanks to @MichelleGilmore for the heads-up]
If I’ve understood correctly, in the future I’ll need a hideous pair of glasses, a bracelet, cordless earphones and a phone in order to send and receive text messages, surf the web and check the weather. Okay, okay, I’m being a bit harsh, but let’s break it down:
The lady only ever sends smileys, which is convenient considering how difficult it would be to actually send text using the proposed interface.
Imagine yourself walking down the street in New York with a few hundred people & cars passing you every minute. Now imagine trying to keep your eyes focussed on your music player’s menu and not bump into anyone or get run over.
If we accept that she’s able to navigate through her music with her eyes, why does she need a wrist/bracelet twitch to accept an incoming text message?
I vaguely remember seeing a study of disorientation caused by goggles back in the bad old days of VR, and as I remember it one of the primary causes of nausea was projecting static, non-moving images over a moving background.
It’s a nicely produced video, and it does have a soft glow of cool, but does it really show an innovative way to improve how we communicate, connect, and navigate the world and our data? Meh, not really. If that’s what the future looks like, I’ll just keep my iPhone, thanks. My tip for the Nokia Research AR team: spend half as much on the next video, and put in twice as much time thinking it all through.
And it’s off-topic, but I’m curious: does anyone understand why the guy in the boat is wearing a kevlar vest?
Fluff with Style
A “one-day” vision video doesn’t have to fall so short of the mark. This video from the architecture faculty of Valle Giulia gives us a feeling for how AR might one day be used to make the study of architecture more engaging, fun and informative.
That’s what an exciting vision looks like! And apparently you don’t have to look like a complete dork just because you’re wearing AR glasses.
Yes, it’s a Game Changer
I loathe the phrase as much as anyone, but AR is a game changer. For us designers, the “game” for the last 20 to 30 years has been two-dimensional planes inside the monitor’s magic box. AR not only gives us a whole new dimension to work & play with, but also breaks the magic box and spills our interfaces out into the world we spend all our time in.
The only question Nokia Research answered above is “how can we get the functions of today’s phone out of the phone?” which to me doesn’t go nearly far enough and is, well, boring. The question I want AR to answer is “where are my superpowers?” Is that too much to ask for?
When my super smart friend Dan Willis asked me to be on his panel at South by Southwest next year, my brain started spinning, trying to imagine what technology will be doing to our lives in five years.
Back in 1992, I helped set up a virtual reality lab at VCU where I was studying design. I’m not ashamed to admit that, at the time, I thought people would be wearing gloves & goggles to conduct their daily business in the Not Too Distant Future. I got over it, of course.
One of the most exciting things I found at the time was a book called Artificial Reality II by Myron Krueger. In it, he put forward the idea of a layer of information projected inside your glasses, synced with the reality outside your glasses. So, for example, you could write a sign in the air with your finger saying “This is it!” outside your house, and save it on a friend’s private channel to help them find your house for the first time. Pretty heady stuff back in 1991, and today almost a reality.
The field’s called Augmented Reality or “AR”, and I’ve been hearing more and more about it every day, but until now, not really paying it too much attention. I took a closer look this week, and here are some of the most striking examples I found, which give a pretty good overview of the state of the field today.
Sixth Sense
Probabaly the most exciting AR application I’ve seen so far, Sixth Sense is unique in that it augments reality by projecting graphics & data out onto the world.
Browsers
An augmented reality browser is software that puts a layer of information over reality, exactly as Myron Krueger foretold back in ‘91. I think it’s inevitable that these will become the hub of our digital lives and a software battlefield.
Layar
Nearest Subway
Marketing
Wherever you’ve got a new technology, you’ll always have someone trying to use it to better sell you stuff. Most of the AR marketing is extremely gimmicky so far, so here just a couple of well-done examples.
Lego
Mini Cabrio
Games
I predict that games will be to AR what porn was to the early internet. It’s just too good a match. Maybe it’s just because it’s so new, but AR feels like magic — it’s fun just because of what it is, no matter what you do with it. Employing that sense of magic in play is a no-brainer. I also predict a rash of rather painful real-world accidents, if the Roku’s Reward video below is anything to go by.
ARhrrrr!
Roku’s Reward
levelHead
PITStrategy
Art
It doesn’t seem like there’s too much experimentation going on in this space yet, but as this video shows, there’s plenty of potential.
Tagged in Motion
Weirdness
Of course, just like marketing gimmicks, wherever there’s a new technology there will be someone building disturbing, sleazy software to entertain creepy, sweaty geeks. Ewww.
Manga Girl
What’s Coming?
Augmented Reality is a very young field, and exciting enough that we designers should be keeping a close eye on it. But just like any technological jump, everyone will eventually get used to it, the sheen of coolness will fade, and it’ll go from being a sexy gimmick to an everyday tool. What then?
AR is such a large enough step away from the desktop / window / mouse world we’ve been clicking in for so long, that I’m certain it will totally bend the brains of us experience designers. We’re so used to thinking in 2D layers of information and linear paths of interaction, it’ll be a while before we really figure out how to squeeze the most out of AR experiences. At the moment the space seems to be dominated by academics on the one hand, and money-grubbing marketers on the other. I’d personally like to see a few of us practical, out in the real world, thinking designers make something out of the AR primordial soup, and I’d love to have a chance to get into it myself.
To keep up with the world of AR, check out these blogs:
These videos are surely just the tip of the iceberg, but I’m pretty new to the world of AR. Have you seen anything stunning out there that should be here too? What’s your favourite AR app? Which of your day-to-day tasks do you look forward to having augmented in the future? If you could have any AR app you wanted, what would it be?
Mathew (with one “t”) Patterson wrote a thoughtful post called “A new mind for web designers?”. In it he poses and tries to answer these questions:
How do web designers fit into this new world? When the html and CSS can be done for a miniscule price in the Philippines, India or China, what will web designers be doing?
But I’ve got to say all of his answers get under my skin slightly. If it’s true that Indians will soon be hacking out beautiful standards compliant, accessible and semantic code, and tweaking CSS with flair, and all for 20% of the price, then yes, that should make a number of people I know nervous. But none of them are designers.
Design is problem solving. Design is visual thinking. Design is an understanding of communication, and how to use colour, form, typography, etc. to get across a message. In the web, design is also understanding usability learnings, guiding users effectively, thinking about flow from page to page and more. Design is not writing HTML or CSS, any more than operating a printing press is design.
But I can’t say Mathew’s wrong exactly. Before computers, “design” was a pretty clear term. There were industrial designers, packaging designers, furniture designers and many more categories, but they all strove to do basically the same things with different tools and materials: solve problems in beautiful and elegant ways. Even when computers made the mechanical side of design accessible to everyone, there was still a clear distinction between desktop-publishing and design. Desktop-publishing was cheap and looked crap, and design was expensive and looked great.
Not long after HTML came along, and visionary businesses realised they were going to need a web site, the word “web designer” popped up. Most people calling themselves web designers at the time were nerds who had learned something about HTML and could put a page together, but they didn’t know the first thing about design. The great thing was that HTML was super-easy and anyone could learn it. The big drawback—for the label “designer”—was that having quickly learned HTML from some tutorials gave you the title “web designer.” Although in most cases “frontend programmer” would’ve been a better fit, “web designer” stuck.
Nowadays those nerds are still hacking code and calling themselves web designers, but at the same time thereareplentyofmastersouttherewho definitely know the difference between Helvetica and Univers, and handcraft their own HTML and CSS. What’s the difference between the “web designers” and the designers? Mathew answers that himself, sort of…
You’ll need to be offering demonstrably more value for your work than the other alternatives. That might be achieved by case studies showing improvements in site sales after website changes, or a proven ability to work with complex backend systems and produce great results.
Insight. Thought. Ideas. Experience. Solutions. Quality. That’s the value of design.
So if you’re out there throwing together code, without much thought to balance, style, user experience, clarity, simplicity, and all the other things that make a good design, you might want to take Mathew’s advice, and think about what to do when the Indians put you out of business. But if you actually are a designer, keep delivering quality. It won’t go out of style.
