This article from searchengineland by Greg Sterling talks about a couple of other reality browsers: wikitude, urberspoon, wheremark. One of the interesting points to me that Sterling makes is this:
"Like voice interfaces AR is a search and discovery tool that is uniquely tailored to the mobile handset and not simply imported from the PC. But interestingly, we’re also starting to see AR make its way onto the PC experience in some ways (in Google Maps for example)."For many years, the holy grail of computing has been capturing data and transactions in databases - where over 80% of the data sit unused. I spent two years of my career implementing and driving utilization of multi-dimensional tools against a pretty complex data warehouse of demographic and financial data. Lots of money, lots of data. When it was all said and done, though, most clients just wanted simple lists and limited trending and were disappointed to discover the data were not always correct, complete or relevant to their query since data were just connected to other data rather than the real world.
With AR, however, the data can have immediacy in time and space. Search and discovery with AR can create a transparency to what is captured and what isn't and allows a person to ask why about each. The ability to situate data in a spatial context is limited by just a few things: imagination, access devices and the ability to access a database housing location specific information. McKinsey's What Matters had a great article by Clay Shirkey on the internet and transparency from 2/09 that I think applies to AR. This quote sizes up how the world changed with social media and where the disruption of AR for the consumer can continue to take us:
"When organizations think about strategy, it’s often in the context of their own objectives. But when the surrounding reality changes—as it is doing in the media landscape—both strategy and goals need to adjust. That is the real lesson of the Obama FISA vote. The disgruntled can now organize, publish, and protest on their own, without using any professional media outlet. Until recently organizations of all stripes were better able to get their messages into the media than any motley groups of individuals. That is no longer true, because two critical organizational advantages—the ability to coordinate group effort and to coordinate group access to the means of publishing—are now ubiquitous, global, and free."
To people who are comfortable with the single position message or believe that much of what we see and hear is real and never orchestrated, this demand on intellectual rigor is probably pretty scary. After all, do they really want to know that the organic food restaurant they are about to eat at has had four occurrences of salmonella poisoning the last three years? Or that the poster child LEEDS building has opened a sports bar in the basement with plasma screen TVs that use twice as much energy as the recycling program can generate as savings in a year? For me, the effect is pretty much opposite. I want to know those other things about the real world. I'm curious about how what I see is connected to other things that I can't see but know are there. I am skeptical that my information is private anyway and figure that in sea of posts,tweets, photos and the ubiquitous status update, I become part of the digital great unwashed.
What appeals to me about AR is the intellectual complexity that comes with accessing, connecting and integrating real and virtual. Overload of my attention span doesn't concern me. I've been filtering out noise for a long time and know that cognitively, our brains are very good at that. I assume we will all find and use privacy and filtering tools to opt in or out. The transparency and complexity that comes with Augmented Reality could very well generate a result we have been seeking since we started storing large amounts of data: information that is accurate in large part because of transparency and shared vetting and analysis that makes sense within a spatial context.
