AR app store

I was having a conversation with someone in the augmented reality industry today. We got onto the topic of how AR will eventually be used by ordinary people to give them various capabilities, without requiring them to become experts.

This reminded me of the Apple App Store. For the first year of the iPhone, third party developers had only one option: Implement something that would run on the Web in the Safari browser.

That all changed with the launch of the App Store a little more than a year after the introduction of the iPhone itself. Developers were now free to create things like maps, games, educational software, programs for visual artists, or pretty much anything else they wanted to offer to the public, without being constrained by the limitations of Safari.

It’s possible that we will see a similar arc after wearables come out. Third party developers will come up with ideas for useful power-ups that the makers of the hardware never thought of.

On the other hand, Web browsers are far more capable and developer-friendly now than they were back in 2007, while apps can be slow to download and to update, as well as posing potential security risks. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just put on your future reality glasses and run everything from a Web browser?

Extradimensional explorations

Recently I have been doing a lot of work in VR to explore visualization and interaction with objects that have four spatial dimensions. It’s a fun topic that has fascinated me since childhood — but now I can actually do something about it.

Alas, our physical universe, as far as we know, only allows us to roam around in three spatial dimensions. Fortunately, newly emerging virtual reality technologies are making it ever easier to simulate that extra spatial dimension.

I am hopeful that this kind of research will help to give wonderful super powers to new generations of children. If you want to learn more about that, you can read it in my blog post today at our Future Reality Lab.

When information is everywhere

It takes a certain amount of work to point your phone at something, isolate a particular physical object of interest, and read information about that object on your phone’s screen. This is true even if you have an easy-to-use app installed for this purpose.

But when SmartPhones are replaced by SmartGlasses, the same operation will take no work at all. The entire process will be so seamless and automatic, you won’t even think about it.

When that happens, all objects will be information objects. Furniture, houses, people, food, whatever you look at will contain information that is instantly available.

This will fundamentally change the nature of our relationship with the world around us. We will stop thinking of information as something different than physical reality.

The next generation of kids will grow up without any inherent separation between physical reality and digital information about that reality. Because of this, they will think about things in a way that is in some ways fundamentally different from the way you or I think about things.

They will grow up to develop ways of reasoning, of going about their day, of work and of play, that are hard for us even to imagine. And they will tell their children of a long ago time before information was everywhere you looked.

To their children, that ancient time will seem like a distant fairy tale. They might wonder what it must have been like to live in such a strange world.

Future super powers

Capabilities we take for granted today were once considered the realm of fantasy. Until about 145 years ago, you couldn’t have a conversation with somebody who was miles away.

Similarly, photography, movies, sound recording, the Web and other media technologies have created new kinds of human super power. What was once considered impossible soon becomes taken for granted.

Various new super powers will emerge when everybody starts wearing those forthcoming Smart Glasses. There are too many to enumerate here, but a few stand out.

You will always be able to identify people you are looking at (and possibly their mood), you will know where you are in traffic (whether walking or driving), you will be able to know just by looking whether that restaurant you like across town has a table for you and your date, or whether there are still good seats at that movie theater.

But I suspect the one I will appreciate the most is the zoom capability. Whatever you are looking at, if you want to see it more clearly, you will be able to simply zoom in for a closer look.

Now that’s what I call a super power!

Moments of simple joy

Life can contain all sorts of nasty surprises and unwelcome turns of fortune. You never know when reality will throw an unpleasant curve ball in your direction.

Yet every once in a while, it’s good to stop, look around you, and simply take stock. Right now I am doing just that.

And I realize that I am actually pretty happy with what I see. Life, for all of its ups and downs, truly does contain many moments of simple joy.

Today I am remembering to honor those moments. And I am also remembering to embrace them with gratitude.

This certainly doesn’t mean that life is perfect. But maybe it doesn’t need to be.

Future personal space

When everyone is wearing SmartGlasses, many things will change. One of those things may be the way we negotiate personal space.

Right now my personal space in the physical world pretty much ends with my body. I can reach out my arms to shake somebody’s hand, or to pick up an object, but generally speaking, that’s about it.

Of course I could choose to pick up an object and throw it at you. But that would generally be an example of my invading your personal space.

But when everyone is wearing SmartGlasses, we will each likely have a visible and sometimes audible cloud of information hovering around us. Objects in the world will also have such clouds of information, depending on their purpose and on our relationship with them.

Where will these clouds of information go? Will they hover between us, over our heads, or float around our hands and fingers?

Whatever the scenario that ends up being widely adopted, the result will be a realignment of physical space. Much like the daemons in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, the virtual extensions of our physical selves will become an intrinsic part of our physical presence for one another.

The finer things in virtual life

When SmartPhones are replaced by SmartGlasses, we won’t need to hold up our phone to see augmented reality. It will just be there, all around us.

When we see a virtual object floating in the middle of a room, or hovering over the sidewalk, everyone else will be seeing it too. From a shared psychological, social and cultural perspective, that object won’t be augmented reality. It will just be reality.

Or will it?

What happens if the privilege of viewing some virtual objects comes at a price? Maybe certain virtual objects will be available only if you have the right subscription service.

Perhaps a social stratification will develop. Only the rich will be able to see the finer things in virtual life. The working classes will just need to settle for muddling by with drab imitations.

We may very well enter a new era of public/private art. Aesthetic experiences geared to the wealthy will be hiding in plain sight, available only to those who wear the right glasses.

But of course those expensive elite objects will not be completely invisible. What is the point of being privileged if the lower classes don’t know about it?

After all, airline passengers in economy class are forced to walk past the ritzy first class section to get to their tiny seats. Similarly, future content providers will provide ways to make sure everybody is aware that augmented reality is a place of economic disparity.

The poor may not ever know what the rich are looking at. But they sure as hell will know that the rich are watching something that they themselves can never see.