Homework week 2

Thoughts on AR and its applications

When I went to the gym recently, I found myself unsure of how to use some of the equipment before me. The equipment had directions pasted on it as a picture, but it wasn’t informative enough for me to be confident in my understanding of the instructions. Wouldn’t it be better to have video instructions on every machine? Setting up a display as part of the machine just to display instructions isn’t the cheapest way to solve this problem, and moreover, it is visual noise for others who know how to use it. I could pull up my phone and look up how to use that particular machine, but how much more convenient would it be to just point my phone at it, and there was an augmented presentation on how to use it?

It is these UX problems that AR promises to solve. The technology answers the question of how do we add relevant information and context to the world around us. One more key strength is that this information can be personalised. Multiple people could be looking at the same scene, and the information they seek could be different. One person in a museum could be interested in finding more detail about the display they are viewing while another could be interested in finding their nearest restroom.

I believe that the technology is as much a leap in the human-computer interface journey as a graphic user interface was to command-line based interaction. The current state of the technology is at an interesting place with the recent improvements in mobile processing power and release of easy to use development kits for mobiles. One of the domains in which AR is slowly taking off is e-commerce. Companies augmenting their products into our surroundings will help us consumers understand the scale of the products. We can see this concept being used for cars  , furniture and  eyeglasses The technology is also used in more fun and frivolous applications like image filters for social media and video games.

AR could also be useful for automobile navigation. Today, the only information we receive about the environment outside the car is what we see with our eyes through the windshield. What if we can make use of multiple cameras to provide us with important information about the scene around us. This information could be the path we need to take to reach a place or a bike in our blind spot. Today, we still rely on a display within our cars for navigation, which is inconvenient at best and dangerous at the worst.

The biggest problem with AR today is the medium of display, flat displays like mobile phones and computer displays still don’t feel intuitive enough, because the user’s reality is “augmented” only on the screen they are viewing. When we are able to remove this barrier between reality and augmented reality, we will have reached a new age of digital interaction. Wearable glasses (or lenses?) that solve this problem are the holy grail of this technology. Wearable AR glasses technology has a long way to go before they become commonplace, and there are many complex problems we need to solve before it becomes a part of our daily life.

Screenshots (and gifs) of a drone, cube and the astronaut augmented over the target image. (Models and animation are from vuforia's sample mars resources)