| Well, it doesn't help that nobody actively releasing apps seems to understand that AR is a lot more than just drawing things on top of a camera feed. Almost every social video platform has some firm of AR filters. Snap probably has the most pervasive use of AR, with tools available to develop new filters (Lens Studio). As of right now, these are the only examples of apps that do something with the tech that can't be done without the tech, and probably done better. You can see why in the games market and Pokémon Go is a good example of why. The AR camera feature distracts, not adds, to the gameplay. Everyone I knew playing the game turned the camera feature off because it drained battery fast and limited play time. Now, I would still call Pokémon Go an AR game, even without the camera feed, because I count the map overlay tracking your real work location a form of AR. It is a feature that augments your reality. And that feature adds to the gameplay. People enjoy traveling to play the game. I think AR games will never be a big thing because AR design is fundamentally at odds with game design. With AR, you have to design an app the works in a context that the user brings in. In contrast, with VR, you're designing an app that provides a context to the user. Game design--especially as done by most game studios--is usually focused on providing a wholly contained experience for the user. And that AR design challenge is just fundamentally more challenging. First of all, we can't get a lot of the interesting information about a user's personal context. The most we can get right now is geographic location, rough estimations of surfaces in their area, and maybe some very rough object classification. We don't know things like whether or not the user has a TV, or where that TV is located. Even if we did, we'll probably never be able to know what brand of TV they have, so now you have a problem of none of the stakeholders caring to ever fund a "TV classifying" project, because they'd never be able to sell the branding tie-in. And I think that's the real problem with both the AR and VR industries. There's little incentive to create a product that users will care about, outside of games, which work better in VR. Any funding your going to find for any use case outside of games will want it 100% married to their brand, but brands have all gotten so indistinguishable from one another that there's nothing to really do. |