A few weeks ago I gushed about how my students killed it at a recent guerrilla future enactment on a ubiquitous Augmented Reality (AR) future. Shortly after that, Mark Zuckerberg announced the Facebook AR platform. The AR uses the camera on your smartphone, and according to a recent WIRED article, transforms your smartphone into an AR engine.
Unfortunately, as we all know, (and so does Zuck), the smartphone isn’t currently much of an engine. AR requires a lot of processing, and so does the AI that allows it to recognize the real world so it can layer additional information on top of it. That’s why Facebook (and others), are building their own neural network chips so that the platform doesn’t have to run to the Cloud to access the processing required for Artificial Intelligence (AI). That will inevitably happen which will make the smartphone experience more seamless, but that’s just part the challenge for Facebook.
If you add to that the idea that we become even more dependent on looking at our phones while we are walking or worse, driving, (think Pokemon GO), then this latest announcement is, at best, foreshadowing.
As the WIRED article continues, tech writer Brian Barrett talked to Blair MacIntyre, from Georgia Tech who says,
“The phone has generally sucked for AR because holding it up and looking through it is tiring, awkward, inconvenient, and socially unacceptable,” says MacIntyre. Adding more of it doesn’t solve those issues. It exacerbates them. (The exception might be the social acceptability part; as MacIntyre notes, selfies were awkward until they weren’t.)”
That last part is an especially interesting point. I’ll have to come back to that in another post.
My students did considerable research on exactly this kind of early infancy that technologies undergo on their road to ubiquity. In another WIRED article, even Zuckerberg admitted,
“We all know where we want this to get eventually,” said Zuckerberg in his keynote. “We want glasses, or eventually contact lenses, that look and feel normal, but that let us overlay all kinds of information and digital objects on top of the real world.”
So there you have it. Glasses are the end game, but as my students agreed, contact lenses not so much. Think about it. If you didn’t have to stick a contact lens in your eyeball, you wouldn’t and the idea that they could become ubiquitous (even if you solved the problem of computing inside a wafer thin lens and the myriad of problems with heat, and in-eye-time), they are much farther away, if ever.
This is why I find my student’s solution so much more elegant and a far more logical trajectory. According to Barrett,
“The optimistic timeline for that sort of tech, though, stretches out to five or 10 years. In the meantime, then, an imperfect solution takes the stage.”
My students locked it down to seven years.
Finally, Zuckerberg made this statement:
“Augmented reality is going to help us mix the digital and physical in all new ways,” said Zuckerberg at F8. “And that’s going to make our physical reality better.”
Except that Zuck’s version of better and mine or yours may not be the same. Exactly what is wrong with reality anyway?
If you want to see the full-blown presentation of what my students produced, you can view it at aughumana.net.
Note: Currently the AugHumana experience is superior on Google Chrome. If you are a Safari or Firefox purest, you may have to wait for the page to load (up to 2 minutes). We’re working on this. So, just use Chrome this time. We hope to have it fixed soon.