Is it just me or does ‘un-uselessness’ look like I slammed my limbs into the keyboard at random? None the less, its been a long time since I’ve posted anything to the AR matome and today I’ve finally felt the push to post again. Since the AR Matome started, Augmented Reality ™ has really grown… and in many ways, not at all. Layar, GM’s AR, wikitude, junaio et al have grown in popularity, evolved in function and efficiency, and are all expressions and platforms of these digital gestures we make to better understand and navigate the world around us. Through these gestures we find real estate and restaurants, float 3D dinosaurs in space and shoot virtual ghosts pasted over what would otherwise be the blasé real world. These apps are voted up, ranked down, downloaded, purchased, shared, installed and deleted in short sporadic moments across markets; now we’ve hit the trough of disillusionment. We all knew it was coming. For some of us it came sooner than others. Don’t get me wrong, I still have faith in augmented reality. But most of this disillusionment, dissatisfaction, sour taste in my mouth comes from a particular death in creative futurism caused by a drive for utility, functionality and usefulness engendered by the culture of The AppStore: Fast, Easy, Bite-Sized, No-strings-attached. A utopian vision of Augmented Reality ™ revolutionizing the web, metadata and the way we live. Yes, I’m saying that the market-place, and essentially culture of ubiquitous computing, is the system responsible for killing the futurist imagination I believe is necessary to make augmented reality a ‘successful’ and interesting technology.
… plug it, play it, burn it, rip it, drag and drop it, zip, unzip it…
Have our technological pursuits changed since the inception of the AppStore? Probably not. We’ve always been pushing for harder better faster stronger. The labs still exist, augmented reality is still researched and developed across academic institutions. But something about the AppStore changed our attitude about technological convenience, and very strongly affects the Augmented Reality ™ industry’s position on AR’s role as a tool of technological convenience. This, combined with the sensitivity AR and AR ™ enthusiasts and professionals to Gartner’s Hype-cycle, made a hypersensitivity to the practical use of our beloved technology.
