Joe Lamantia.com

Since I wrote about the user expe­ri­ence of aug­mented real­ity less than two weeks ago, the most impor­tant devel­op­ment is the arrival of aug­mented iPhone apps (unof­fi­cially for the moment, offi­cially in September).

Why is this so impor­tant, when Wik­i­tude and other AR Android apps have been avail­able for almost a year?  Bring­ing aug­mented real­ity to the iPhone changes the cul­tural assump­tions made about AR expe­ri­ences as a class of offer­ing. Endors­ing AR expe­ri­ences for iPhone users moves aug­mented real­ity from the geek realm of Android and Google, to the chic world of Apple.  Cul­tur­ally, the assump­tions we make about the new prod­ucts and ser­vices from Apple and Google are dri­ven largely by the dif­fer­ences in way we per­ceive the two brands.  Apple is chic, while Google is geek.

Look­ing Ahead

Con­nect­ing the Apple brand to aug­mented expe­ri­ences will per­suade many peo­ple to try out AR.  Yet as I’ve said, and many oth­ers as well, get­ting the user expe­ri­ence of aug­mented real­ity ‘right’ is absolutely the crit­i­cal ele­ment to the long term via­bil­ity of this new class of expe­ri­ences.  This entails two efforts.

First, design­ers must refine the expe­ri­ences offered by all those AR appli­ca­tions based on the four clas­sic inter­ac­tion pat­terns known so far — Head-Up Dis­play, Tri­corder, Holochess, and X-ray Vision.  Two fac­tors make refine­ment essen­tial: com­pe­ti­tion from other AR offer­ings that reduces the nov­elty value of your expe­ri­ence, and increased ‘load’ on the UX in the form of actual use for every­day pur­poses in the com­plex set­ting of real life.  Think about try­ing to choose where to get lunch for the after­noon by sort­ing through 1500 list­ings for cof­fee shops and restau­rants while stand­ing on a street cor­ner in the rain in Lon­don hold­ing your phone aloft.  The func­tional aspects of AR expe­ri­ences just aren’t refined enough to han­dle the inter­ac­tion design, visu­al­iza­tion, and con­tex­tual sen­si­tiv­ity chal­lenges implied. [Pre­dic­tion: AR usage cases will nat­u­rally set­tle on a set of com­mon sce­nar­ios that bal­ance the strengths and weak­nesses of each of the four clas­sic pat­terns.  More spec­u­la­tion on that in a later post.]

Sec­ond, design­ers must address the gaps in the set of con­cepts now used as the basis for imag­in­ing new aug­mented expe­ri­ences.  I flagged six ‘miss­ing’ pat­terns in the range of expe­ri­ences offered so far; Loner, Sec­ond Hand Smoke, Pay No Atten­tion To the Man Behind the Cur­tain, The Invis­i­ble Man!, Tun­nel Vision, and AR for AR’s Sake (see the arti­cle for details).  I’m sure the very savvy read­ers of this blog can iden­tify even more.

I hope all the AR inno­va­tors, design­ers, and entre­pre­neurs work­ing hard on the crest of this break­ing wave of tech­nol­ogy find ways to take on both of these tasks.  If they can’t refine the exist­ing mod­els and fill in those expe­ri­ence gaps, then nei­ther Apple chic nor Google geek cred will suf­fice to make aug­mented real­ity viable in the long term.  And what could lit­er­ally be a new way of see­ing the world — one with legit­i­mate poten­tial for chang­ing our behav­ior with regard to urban spaces, the envi­ron­ment, social struc­tures, play, and eco­nom­ics, among just a few spheres of human activ­ity — will remain lit­tle more than a cam­era obscura style curiosity.