Last week, I gave a presentation at the Premier CIO Summit in Connecticut on the Future of User Interaction With Technology, especially the combined effects of developments in communicating without a keyboard, augmented reality (AR) and machine learning. I’ve been interested in this for some time and have written about AR as part of the Wearables movement and what I call EyeTech.
First, it would help to distinguish these digital realities. In virtual reality, a person is placed in a completely virtual world, eyes fully covered by a VR headset – it’s 100% digital immersion. It is ideal for games, space exploration, and movies, among other yet to be created uses.
With augmented reality, there is a digital layer that is added onto the real physical world. People look through a device – a smartphone, special glasses and the like – that still lets them see the real things in front of them.
Some experts make a further distinction by talking about mixed reality in which that digital layer enables people to control things in the physical environment. But again, people can still see and navigate through that physical environment.
When augmented was first made possible, especially with smartphones, there were a variety of interesting but not widespread uses. A good example is the way that some locations could show the history of what happened in a building a long time ago, so-called “thick-mapping”.
There were business cards that could popup an introduction and a variety of ancillary information that can’t fit on a card, as in this video.
There were online catalogs that enabled consumers to see how a product would fit in their homes. These videos from Augment and Ikea are good examples of what’s been done in AR.
A few years later, now, this audience was very interested in learning about and seeing what’s going on with augmented reality. And why not? After a long time under the radar or in the shadow of Virtual Reality hype, there is an acceleration of interest in augmented (and mixed) reality.
Although it was easy to satirize the players in last year’s Pokémon Go craze, that phenomenon brought renewed attention to augmented reality via smart phones.
Just in the last couple of weeks, Mark Zuckerberg at the annual Facebook developers conference stated that he thinks augmented reality is going to have tremendous impact and he wants to build the ecosystem for it. See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/technology/mark-zuckerberg-sees-augmented-reality-ecosystem-in-facebook.html
As beginning of the article puts it:
“Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has long rued the day that Apple and Google beat him to building smartphones, which now underpin many people’s digital lives. Ever since, he has searched for the next frontier of modern computing and how to be a part of it from the start.
“Now, Mr. Zuckerberg is betting he has found it: the real world. On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg introduced what he positioned as the first mainstream augmented reality platform, a way for people to view and digitally manipulate the physical world around them through the lens of their smartphone cameras.”
And shortly before that, an industry group – UI LABS and The Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance (AREA) – united to plot the direction and standards for augmented reality, especially now that the applications are taking off inside factories, warehouses and offices, as much as in the consumer market. See http://www.uilabs.org/press/manufacturers-unite-to-shape-the-future-of-augmented-reality/
Of course, HoloLens from Microsoft continues to provide all kinds of fascinating uses of augmented reality as these examples from a medical school or field service show.
Looking a bit further down the road, the trend that will make this all the more impactful for CIOs and other IT leaders is how advances in artificial intelligence (even affective computing), the Internet of Things and analytics will provide a much deeper digital layer that will truly augment reality. This then becomes part of a whole new way of interacting with and benefiting from technology.
© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved. @NormanJacknis