What will it take to finally start an Augmented Reality future?
A promise that has yet to be fulfilled
Nearly two years ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook sat down onstage with Republican Senator Orrin Hatch to discuss a bevy of topics regarding technology. During their conversation, Cook touched on the topic of Augmented Reality and the massive potential it has to play a role in our lives. “AR is gonna take a little while, because there’s some really hard technology challenges there”, he said. “But it will happen. It will happen in a big way. And we will wonder — when it does happen — how we lived without it. Kind of how we wonder how we lived without our smartphones today.”
Like Cook, there is little doubt in my mind that Augmented Reality is going to play a big part in the future we are headed towards. While Virtual Reality may have had most of the attention thanks to the unprecedented hype started by Oculus nearly 6 years ago, it hasn’t gained the traction that tech evangelists and analysts forecasted. This is mainly due to the fact that the uses that are currently available on VR is not enough to justify the high cost of entry for a proper experience. AR, on the other hand, is something that is available on most modern smartphones and tablets, which immediately eliminates that barrier of entry. In addition to the fact that AR is already in use on many social apps, and numerous companies are working on wearable AR tech — including Apple, Snap, and Magic Leap — AR is poised to be the technology that is adopted more widely and used more often by the general public.
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It’s hard to believe that it was over two years ago when most people had their first ever AR experience on their smartphones. I don’t even think that the folks at Nintendo and Niantic Labs foresaw the explosion of their little game known as Pokémon Go. On its first week alone on the Apple App Store, it was not only the fastest downloaded app in history, but it was also one of the most downloaded apps ever. Knowing this at the time, many within the tech industry believed that this was the start of a new era in mobile, one where we begin to engage and interact with the world differently through the use of AR. When Apple, Google, and Facebook subsequently announced their AR tools for developers, it honestly seemed like that future was just within reach.
However, after the dust settled and the first wave of AR apps from enthusiastic developers were released, there was little to no reaction from the general public. Even people within the tech landscape weren’t really using these new creations in their lives often. Aside from the occasional use of filters in social media apps like Snapchat and Instagram, the excitement for AR has all but dissipated. The technology is certainly available, and so is the reach to consumers, but the apps just aren’t taking off. For something that was hailed as “the next generation of interaction” and had a fair amount of momentum behind it, this seems like the total opposite of what was predicted. So what exactly went wrong here?
The technology is certainly available, and so is the reach to consumers, but the apps just aren’t taking off.
One potential issue regarding the slow spread of AR is that most people are just not aware that apps centered entirely around the technology exists. Most ads from smartphone manufacturers rarely highlight the capability of using AR, and as a result, consumers are just not on the lookout for apps that use it. This is a strange problem to me, as you’d expect Apple and Google to want to let the world know that this magical feature is now available on their devices in order to convince people to buy them. Maybe we’ll see this be the case later this year when the next models of the iPhone and the Pixel are released along with their respective operating systems. But right now, the adoption of AR could benefit off some more hype from the tech juggernauts.
Another possibility as to why AR isn’t scaling fast enough is that maybe consumers aren’t interested in mobile-based AR, and are instead waiting on affordable, stylish eyewear that displays AR content wirelessly. The AR eyewear that are currently available are not only insanely expensive (Magic Leap’s headset starts at around $2,300, Microsoft’s HoloLens starts at $3000), but they look very big and clunky, which is far too unattractive for the average person. As of right now, these devices are meant for and only in the hands of innovators and some early adopters. However, as the technology improves and the component costs drop considerably, we could potentially see a mass-market wireless AR headset arrive in a mere 3 to 5 years.
But I believe the most likely reason as to why AR apps aren’t being adopted quickly is because most of them on smartphones are not a dramatic improvement compared to regular apps in terms of functionality. Rather than providing experiences that can only be done through AR or improving on an existing idea, AR apps lets you do what you normally did on your phone, just in the real world. Consequently, there is little to no compelling reason to want to include a physical environment in one’s daily activities, whether it be reading the news, taking care of a virtual pet, or playing a mini-game. The amount of effort it takes to do these tasks through AR is more difficult than simply doing them traditionally, and that is something most people are just not willing to do.
Rather than providing experiences that can only be done through AR or improving on an existing idea, AR apps lets you do what you normally did on your phone, just in the real world.
One groundbreaking innovation that had this issue very early on was the World Wide Web. During that time, the Web consisted of mostly academic and government content for people to access. There weren’t many websites for personal entertainment, to connect with others, or to even query the net efficiently. But as developers began to shift their mentality on what the Web can and should be, that began to change very dramatically and quickly. As a result, the Web became the hub for innovation and a tool that us as humans have a hard time living without today.
I believe that something similar is what it’s going to take to spark the Augmented Reality revolution. In my opinion, there should be a general understanding amongst developers that AR apps are inherently different from apps we’ve grown accustomed to for over a decade now, and the creation of them should be approached as such. As a developer myself, I understand that this is not going to be very simple. However, creating anything that changes the course of human history has never been easy. With that said, here are some of the things developers can do to get more AR experiences in the hands of users:
Eliminate the Learning Curve
If you ask most AR enthusiasts on how they feel when jumping into an experience, most of them will tell you that they can do so with ease. If you ask the average joe, they’ll probably tell you that it can be a frustrating, time-consuming task that just doesn’t seem worth all the trouble. Part of the reason for this is that some AR apps have a laissez-faire approach to onboarding, which ultimately fails to guide users properly on how to get started. Things get even more complicated when interacting with the AR environment is unintuitive and consists of a multitude of complicated gestures.
This doesn’t have to be the case.
What developers can do to ease the learning curve for users is providing explicit instructions on how to find a proper surface, how to use gestures that are somewhat familiar from apps they’ve used in the past, and where they should move in an environment to do certain tasks. Even after the initial onboarding process, there should be little subtle hints that pop up as a person is using the app, which introduces them to new actions that would otherwise have been too complicated to explain.
Make Unique Experiences
AR is one of the most important technological advancements to happen in over a decade, and it has the potential to change everything as we know it. But as mentioned earlier, many AR apps try to do things that can be already be done in a regular app well. This not only fuels the false narrative that AR is a big gimmick, but it discourages users to ever want to use another AR app again. Needless to say, it is imperative that more developers focus on making apps than can either be done only in an AR environment, or use AR to improve on an existing idea in a dramatic way.
Because this is fairly new tech to the general public, making more unique experiences is one of the ways devs can get people to grow accustomed to AR and wanting to use it more in their lives.
Utilize Device Features
In 2015, Apple’s most touted feature for the iPhone 6s at the time was 3D Touch. The feature allowed for new interaction possibilities and has since been in every iPhone after. However, 3D Touch is not used very often in apps today, not to mention that most people don’t even know the feature exists.
But 3D Touch was only limited to 2D apps, until now.
AR requires users to navigate their physical space with 3D assets, so implementing 3D Touch in some way would make interactions feel more natural and introduce new behaviors that users will have for years to come. This is one example of taking advantage of a device’s feature creatively to make AR work better, which is something more devs should do if they want to make the tech feel more innovative to the average person.
Plenty of smartphones today have some features to them that have untapped potential waiting to be opened in an AR context. Whether it be the TrueDepth front-facing camera and the aforementioned 3D Touch on the iPhone X, the face detection and S-Pen on the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, or the 360° camera on the Essential Phone. All that’s left is the creativity of developers to understand each device’s strengths and to capitalize on them to make groundbreaking AR apps.
At this point in time it is probably clear to most that an Augmented Reality future isn’t going to happen overnight, nor will it happen very soon. But what is clear is that there is still a lot that we can to do begin getting this transformative technology in the hands of people around the world. This tech is something that was only possible in science fiction, something that we never thought would see the light of day so soon. Today, we have the opportunity to be the pioneers of a brand-new era while making history in the process, and I’m hoping that any developers who read this will understand that this is going require a massive team effort. From large corporations to a single indie developer, all of us will have work hard and flex every creative, technical, and entrepreneurial muscle we’ve got to make sure we make this AR future finally come into fruition.
As Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz once said, “For cool things to happen, you have to get out of your comfort zone”.
