What we want from AR glasses ?

I’m wondering do we know what we want from glasses that will support augmented reality ? I’m wondering do we live in the world of sci-fi movies or maybe consumer do not need so abstract devices ? Maybe we can use something less elegant but without some flaws ? Let us think about it for a second

Comfort

First thing is comfort. They may not look as cool as we see in the movies but for sure they need to be comfortable. We need to remember that we are talking about device that we want to wear on our faces for couple hours a day. Such glasses can’t be heavy to avoid neck pain. They need to be easy to wear, stable during all every day activities, similar like standard glasses. Maybe some kind of belt over your head ? This would do the trick but I don’t think that it would be the best idea. Comfort is a very important element, easy to think, hard to achieve

Battery life

What is the biggest problem with modern devices from smartphone through smartwatch to your laptop ? Battery life. Wearables are special type of devices. We want to get from them a lot of cool features, a lot of helpers in every day life and we want to forget about that they have battery inside. I think that 12-16 hours on one battery cycle is an absolute must. Anything less than that will be just annoying for the user. Think about glasses that you need to charge 2 times a day. You will just stop using it beside some special occasions. Is it easy to achieve ? I’m afraid that no. Let us consider main reasons:

·       Not a lot of space. Yes, we are getting better and better in miniaturization but still comfortable glasses won’t have a lot of room to put the battery. The battery can’t be to big (weight) so there might be a problem with the capacity. Making it leaner and leaner also is not such a good idea (remember the case of Samsung Note 7 ? ) so this will be a major problem

·       A lot of operations related with generating AR images, calculating positions and so on are complicated from algorithmic point of view. It will use a lot of CPU power and it will have a big impact on the battery life. Every tick of the CPU is consuming power so the math here is easy 😉

Content

I’ve already mentioned in one of my previous articles that content is also a very important element. Maybe not on the start because augmented reality is a cool technology and a lot of people will just use it for some tests BUT if we are talking about regular consumer, than device that is just “cool” won’t make it. Content need to provided asap and it must be a high quality content. We love our smartphones and we are used to have everything there. Augmented reality and glasses is hard combo for standard consumer, it is easy to think about usage of this in industry, business or logistic, but how to use it on street ? This is a bit harder, and this must be solved before putting such glasses into the market

Style

Last but no least….style. We are not talking here about glasses that will be used in some factory, we are talking about something that we want to wear on street, that we want to wear during our meetings with friends. Such glasses can’t look like some “geek” experiment, they need to be nice, they need to fit to our cloths, our style. Connecting style with hardware usability is a very big problem. Look at the laptops and smartphones. It took some time before those devices become usable and good looking and in this example we are talking about much bigger peace of hardware. Talking about good style for such glasses might sound a bit stupid but we want those glasses to be available for regular consumer, for every day usage. They just MUST look good

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Augmented reality in business

Business, nothing new. We are all connected with this word in some way. What can change in future ? What we can get from implementing augmented reality in business ? Is this only a new fancy "gadget" or maybe it will give something valuable that allow to improve sale and/or product itself ?

Augmented reality = new possibilities

Augmented reality can offer a lot more than only couple of cool visual effect on screen of your smartphone. Why I'm talking about smartphone ? Because - at least for now - augmented reality possibilities will be limited to mobile devices in business (don't worry there will be a exception). Glass type project are still in minority, they need still a lot of work before we see them in on our faces. But that isn't a problem. You can already see people in stores taking pictures of floor panels to rethink everything in home. But what to do to make it better ?

So what new possibilities we can get from augmented reality ? Lets talk about couple of them.

Furniture shops

Did you ever tried to furnish a room ? Do you know how many questions you need to answer if you want to do it properly ? Do you know how many doubts you have when you want to pick something ? How it will look like when I put it near this closet ?

Project like this are the answer:

This is a great usage of augmented reality with mapping over a known picture. You can simply put magazine when you want to put new furniture and check how it will look like. Very handy and useful.

Important thing is that you need an object to map the virtual element. It allows you to move around it and check from different sides. It allows to scale to product so you can really act like you have a new sofa in the room. Putting only images on the screen is a really bad idea and gives to user a poor effect. Example below (don't do it like this ! ):

Augmented reality + factories = improvements

Ok, now lets go to different part of augmented reality. Goggles. What are the problems related with jobs related with manual work in - for example - factory that produces cars ? Two most common are:

    1. Human errors during assemble

    2. Cost related with learning new worker

Both of them can be fixed or at least reduced using augmented reality. Imagine a worker with special goggles that analyze parts in front of the worker and shows what should go where and how it should be connected/assembled. It will strongly reduce count of errors made by human. It will help to increase quality of the product with out increasing the cost of the work. This is the path which business should follow.

Now the second case. If the new worker will also have same glasses, it will allow to reduce time needed from a senior worker. It will increase his time in the job that he should do. And again, with out increasing the costs we increase performance.

There is a lot of augmented reality project related with business and big data. One of my favorite is Daqri. Helmet that their building is a fantastic usage of augmented reality, it has endless potential and possibilities.

Not only Daqri, we also have interesting project from VW:

Marketing

Ok now something easy. How to interest a potential client with our product ? We need to do something cool ! Something that will make him to pay attention on the product. Augmented reality is a fantastic tool for that. Look at this Coca-Cola campaign:



So easy, and so great effect. Augmented reality is a powerful tool that refers to a very important feeling...fun. Lets be honest, we all want to have fun, we all want to spend a good time. If you give a tool that will give fun to client and allow you to focus him on the product, than you`re a winner. If you want to do that think about augmented reality. 



This even don't have to be a strict commercial related with your product, if you can softly mark your brand there, than it is very often more than enough. Look on the possibilities of augmented reality in marketing. I shown only two examples but marketing business has done homework. Usage of this technology is more and more often. And why it is so big success ? Because for common people this is still technology about witch they don't know a lot



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castAR - Augmented reality gaming glasses

Today I've found this: http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2071-augmented-reality-castar-gaming-glasses-pax

First - or at least one of the first - true augmented reality gaming glasses. I must say that I have very mixed felling about this. As for me augmented reality is synonym of freedom, flexibility. castAR is a very interesting project, it can give a lot of fun but it is opposite of things that I admire in augmented reality.

First of all games presented there are...poor. Battle ships, marbles....it is ok as POC but for real usage it is just not enough. I hope there will be something much more interesting.
Second thing is that user is really fixed to place where he want to play, special surface, connection to device. The whole magic magic of AR just disappears. There is no interaction with world. As for me this is just a different type of display, not different type of fun or game.

castAR has a very big potential, and I hope it will get better and better and they will achieve the goal that they want but at the moment they`re missing the "wooow" effect. The true fun and excitement related to augmented reality is just missing.

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