AR, We Are Ready And Willing But Where Are You?

Posted by Lester Madden under Augmented Reality

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In response to my post on Friday I had a lot of discussions with people in the office talking about the commercial usage of AR. While everyone agrees that it’s a super cool technology, the question on everyone’s lips is, if its so good why isn’t it here already?

When you search the web there are loads of great articles about how great augmented reality is. There are plenty of videos of killer demos, everything from education to advertising all showing a glimpse on how this will change our lives. No doubt the buzz is AR is going to change the world, but when you look at the dates when the videos were published they are all several years old. What happened,why are we still waiting? Are we waiting for the technology to evolve beyond smartphones? Has the technology been oversold? Or were we just optimistic on when it would arrive?

Maybe part of the problem is in the hardware, as Nitin commented on my post , if you have to take a phone and wave it at a subject then you’ll miss the opportunity.

Fortunately it seems that the hardware problem is being worked on.

I do like Nitin’s dream AR scenario. Imaging seeing someone at a conference, instantly you have access to their LinkedIn profile, you’d know all the contacts you have in common, maybe even have access to the last 10 emails you corresponded on.

I posted a fantastic video from the TED conference as a response to Nitin’s comment which shows that having to view the world though a phone may only be a temporary solution.

Another great example of why its cool but it’s still not an answer to the question of why we are not knee deep in AR applications and technolgy.

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