Daydreaming About Augmented Reality

Often after talks I’m asked about future trends in social media in the short and long term.  Obviously some answers change dramatically based on the industries and audiences we’re focusing on, but there are some common themes such as many turning inward and becoming more private (for the benefit of close-knit groups of friends or like-interests).  One common distruptor we can always count on is the pace of certain technologies.  In a single day you can blow the mind of your average consumer (and your average blogger) with a single introduced technology.  While the debut of a life-changing software application was relatively rare ten years back, now new abilities for personal and business use seem to pop up once a month, and many of them really do change how we operate.

Take “augmented reality” (or “AR” for short) and what it could mean for any number of industries.  An example of AR would be using your iPhone’s camera to view the world around you, with the iPhone displaying graphics overlayed on the “real” view of your surroundings.  A Parisian subway application gives us a hint of what such a capability could offer (see the Fast Company article).  In an industry like healthcare perhaps you could have distances to facilities and services mapped out before you.  For higher education and hospitals, virtual tours could provide all sorts of hotspots.  And obviously any history buff can envision a walking tour where content appeared based on your position and offer a view from another era.  Fast Company further points out it’s not just about smartphones, but kiosks as well such as in this Lego example. 

 AR is just one example of something with tremendous potential that could destroy predictions if it soars quickly. It could potentially make massive changes in the social spheres online—imagine an AR app that “shows” you the locations of virtual stores, complete with hanging-in-mid-air Tweeted reviews from moments before; or a series of AR “mirrors” that are just monitors with cameras, but allow you to “collect” items in a store for an outfit so you can see what it would look like on you without trying on a thing- and then send to friends on Facebook for instant feedback with a poke in the air of a logo.

Daydreaming about AR may be a geek’s passion, but the tools are in hands now and the avalanche of technology is coming. Keeping one eye on what audiences are doing and could be doing is exactly where this geek likes to be.

UPDATE: Think this is far off? Read this: Yelp just snuck in the first U.S. iPhone app with AR with their "Monocle" feature...

-Dean