To Ride The AR Hype or Avoid It?
I write this post realizing that if I were to title it, “The Top 20 Augmented Reality Apps That Will Totally Change Every Aspect Of Your Life,” that it would get way more hits, and would probably be tweeted about nonstop for the next three days. Thing is, in reality, not one truly life changing app exists yet, outside of a special effects lab. It seems, though, that no one in the blogosphere really cares. Augmented Reality is the sensationalist tech headline of 2009.
AR developers can’t change the hype cycle, but they can position themselves to withstand the upcoming trough of disillusionment. I think it will come with the iPhone 3.1 launch, when users find that the mobile AR tech isn’t quite at the level it’s advertised to be. So, how does a developer set themselves apart from the sea of wannabe AR upstarts? Here are a few suggestions:
Develop either your own AR tech or unique implementation of existing tech
If I wanted to, I could find someone to create a 3D model and put on a marker for less than $500. No AR developer is going to survive, in the long run, if they provide a product that can be reproduced by an offshore company, for a fraction of the price. This will soon include GPS/Compass based AR, as an open source toolkit is already available.
At Zugara, we’re busy creating web based, core frameworks, as well as new implementations of current frameworks, with a focus on practical applications. Companies with this mindset will win out in the long run, because those focusing most of their efforts on getting short term, viral publicity won’t have a viable product when the novelty of Augmented Reality wears off in a few months.
Don’t post videos promising more than you can currently give a live demo of
I put Layar 2.0 on the company G1 development phone yesterday. It’s a good app for what it does, but like all GPS/Compass based mobile apps, in my opinion, it isn’t worth the “OMFG this is AMAZING” blog posts that it’s getting. I’m confident that when the mass populace gets a hold of these types of apps, there might be a novelty to them in the beginning, but no one in their right mind will use them over a Google Maps implementation.
I, like many people, have been watching the hype following Layar for many months, where it was presented as overlaying information over the real world. In reality it overlays things in such an inaccurate manner that the camera feed is a completely unnecessary component of the program. This is nothing against the program itself, since the hardware technology doesn’t really permit any more functionality than is offered. I will, however, point a finger at how Layar was lacking in pre-release, live use video demos, since in the long run, the fostering of over expectation of a product’s abilities hurts the brand behind it. I believe that this is what will happen to most of the companies focusing on iPhone 3.1 AR.
In order to get around this problem, the smart AR developer clearly marks a video that they can’t reproduce in a live demo as being a concept or a work in progress. An even smarter developer never releases any promotional videos without a matching live run video. Following this rule will present the company as being more legitimate than those just looking to get some press.
Note: Ahead of possible comments, I’ll acknowledge that Zugara’s Webcam Social Shopper only has a promo video available to the public. This is because it was written as an API for clothing retailers to utilize with their product database. A fully working demo, with a sample database, is regularly demoed to clients.
Think outside of the box
Rather than repeat myself, for my reasoning behind moving away from visual examples, check out my earlier post on eye candy AR.
Augmented Reality is a visually amazing thing the first time you see it, and I think that this forces many people’s creativity towards visual implementations (including map overlays, since they don’t really provide any more functionality than an overhead implementation). This doesn’t mean, on order to be ahead of the curve, that it’s necessary to create totally new forms of AR from the ground up. In fact, I’m confident that the really exciting implementations, over the next few months, will be a mixing of object/marker recognition based AR with social networking tech.
I’m sure someone will read that and say, “TAT already did that with Augmented ID,” except that I haven’t seen a live demo video of it, so in my book, it’s a concept project only and holds as much weight as Minority Report. Zugara’s game, CannonBallz, on the other hand, even though it’s simpler version of AR is motion tracking and 2D overlays, uses Facebook Connect to share game photos. It gives users an interactive glimpse into what will be available in the near future for AR.
Overall, what I’m trying to get across is simply to be responsible when conceptualizing, developing and promoting your AR products, because pretty soon the public is going to be demanding substance over swagger, and right now there’s a whole lot of swagger going around.
The promotion video for Layar was (UPDATE: changed "a post production job" to "a completely controlled environment demo that can not be reproduced by the end user") that heightened many peoples' expectations. To what extent is debatable.
TAT’s Augmented ID is another example of a product that many people think is already at the proof of concept stage, even though there is no evidence that it is anything more than a post production video.