Pokemon Reality

The last two weeks have reminded me that I'm old and I blame Pokemon Go.  I'm a half-generation too old even to approach it as a nostalgia item.  Also, the MSD (Middle School Daughter, for those of you that had forgotten) is too tied up in UnderTale and listening to 8-bit soundtracks to care about Pikachu and friends.  No, my generation got Garbage Pail Kids and ain't no one making a phone game out of those.

(Source: Geekyrant.com)

So, I'm old because I don't want to go chasing around the southwestern american desert in the summer racking up data charges looking for virtual cockfighting contestants.  Instead, I want to look at the whole phenomenon as the first real use of Augmented Reality in a marketing campaign.

Wearable Reality

One Too Many Hands

This week, instead of bagging on the state of home automation technology, I thought I'd step out into the realm of speculation.  Specifically, the future intersection of wearables and augmented reality.

That these two technologies, one emerged and the other emerging, have anything in common may seem either really obvious or not.  On the one hand, augmented reality will require a headset or glasses or contacts or something worn over the eyes (at least in the near future).  And that something will need to be connected, defining it as a 'wearable'.

On the other hand, the end goal of augmented reality is to create a seamless bridge between actual reality and the augmentations.  The headset/glasses/contacts need to disappear from the user's perceptions as much as possible allowing them to get lost in the experience.  The augmented reality that people at Microsoft and elsewhere are talking about is that experience, not the hardware.  Think of it like a Hollywood movie: we are excited for the story, not the projector.  The same holds true with AR: end users need to be focusing on the new capabilities and not how they are created (unless the creation tool limits those capabilities).

But what I really want to discuss is a third way (hand?) of looking at AR which may make it the ultimate wearable.  If we are using AR to define our reality and to share this redefinition with others who are also augmenting theirs, why not define our clothing, our look, our style through AR?

AR 'and' VR

Not 'or'

I've seen a lot of writing that compares Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality.  They treat these two technologies as if they are in competition.  That one will win out over the other in some weird Techno Thunderdome of marketing and consumer choice.

(with various exploits, brute force and denial of services attacks instead of halberds and chainsaws, with the invisible hand of laissez faire economics bouncing the two competitors around: Two techs enter, One tech leaves!)

In reality (without Thunderdomes... so sad.), these two technologies serve different use cases with only a little overlap.  Both can exist side-by-side and most people will ultimately adopt both.