Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality+Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative around augmented reality this past year. We've seen the arms (eyes?) race rapidly develop, culminating recently with the
+YCombinator-backed
+meta announcing their "SpaceGlasses" [1], one of the first truly compelling experiences built around a convincingly capable device [2].
The hardest part of augmented reality is not the hardware, nor the computer vision software—both extremely difficult academic challenges in their own right, and certainly not to be taken by the faint of heart—but in the
experience.
These problems will be solved, through no small effort, but they
will be solved. The most daunting challenge is to build a compelling story that binds the available data (read "the Internet") to the real world, and exposes it in an unobtrusive and seamless fashion. This too will emerge naturally, but early pioneers in the space need to think carefully about the application of augmented reality in order to succeed; no one wants a world filled with advertisements [3], and in fact—some even try to eliminate them [4].
Here,
+Field Trip attempts to builds one such compelling story. The experience of contextual information making
itself available
without interrupting your interactions with the real world is so tantalizingly close you can feel it, but one wonders just how much control the user will have over the frequency and relevance of the information "popups". In the early days of the software industry (late 60s, early 70s), an ongoing debate between the [then] default of free software vs. closed software unfolded, setting the foundation for today's conversation around open source and free [5] software. I'll be talking more about this in a presentation at the upcoming
#RTP180 : Open Source All Things event [6] in North Carolina.
It's another step forward for ubiquitous augmented reality, an exciting one indeed, but one that won't achieve mass adoption until the user can control their own experience [7].
[1]:
https://www.spaceglasses.com/[2]:
SpaceGlasses are the future of computing[3]:
https://vimeo.com/8569187[4]:
http://unlogo.org/pages/about[5]: that's free as in
libertas, not as in
gratis.
[6]:
http://www.rtp.org/rtp-180-open-source-all-things[7]: I recently started a project to this effect called "Para", a client-agnostic peer-to-peer network for implementing a data layer on top of the real world. I'm seeking collaborators! Check it out:
http://para.io
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