What’s wrong with the real world?
I was intending on writing a fairly serious article on augmented reality (AR) applications here but then I read Charlie Brooker’s hilarious article documenting the obscene uses such technology can be put to work on. So I will continue writing but with the caveat that AR is most certainly not a replacement for real life but may in some cases enhance your understanding of the world around you and in others it could end up making you miss the blindingly obvious.
So why are we interested in it here at Second Variety? Well for a number of reasons…
As we move forward with our business we’re finding that we are getting interest in the mobile Internet from new clients who want to use mobiles to communicate to their target audience, whether this is through a mobilised website or application to providing location based services. AR can serve certain users information in way that makes more sense than a traditional text based interface.
On my MSc course at Edinburgh a group of students used it to hide art works in plain site (here’s the BBC article). This was my first exposure to AR and I was impressed by the results as well as inspired by the possibilities for layering of information and serving to those who know what to look for.
Prior to my digital design masters I studied Classics, Ancient History and Latin and the like. My dissertation was all about historical reconstruction of ancient sites using 3D modelling technology hence why I now work in the digital sphere. It led me to ask why Google hadn’t introduced the fourth dimension into its Google Earth application – my question was quickly answered on Twitter by Andrew Turner (@ajtuner) who pointed me to KMZ file that used a timeline to show the City of London from 1961 to the present. It is very basic in its modelling using Sketchup but clearly demonstrates a great potential for overlaying time based information.
I think in terms of a historical point of view and for me whats interesting about AR is that we now have a technology that can allow historical data to persist in the present. It will change our perspective of the place we live, not just by allowing us to spot the latest shopping deals or find the nearest Tube, allowing us to make better decisions about how to modify our built environments for example by showing us historical simulations of how these environments evolved. It has implications for all areas of modern business, arts and science but ulitmately it allows people to make better decisions based on realtime information and more importantly using the historical bank of data that we have built up on the Net.
Imagine being able to track your local social networks or perhaps view simulation of the social history of a street where your parents lived using data from a site like My Heritage. For social profilers, anthropologists and even marketeers the social and ethnographic information will provide a wealth of information about peoples behaviours just by pointing their phones/transparent displays at a location and viewing changes over time.
Government planning departments could be transformed… god knows they need to be!
You see data about the the present is all well and good but when taken in context i.e. its place in history and not just its location it becomes far more meaningful. I for one intend to use and hopefully develop applications for this technology that enable better decision making for my clients, users and for myself. The future of augmented reality is exciting but it means nothing without the past.
