Augmented Reality, technology that places data or images on top of our view of the world around us, is hot. Under development in research labs for decades and in use in industry for years, Augmented Reality (AR) began to hit the mainstream consumer market in 2009. Hundreds of AR applications were launched last year, around products like Topps baseball cards and GE's Smart Grid.
Consumer AR, whether it be on your mobile phone or delivered through your computer's webcam, tends to be a mixture of utility and advertising. How far will those types of content go and what balance do we want between them? London Architecture Graduate Student Keiichi Matsuda has produced a gripping video placing these questions inside a scenario of pure eye candy. Check it out.
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Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
Matsuda's video, titled Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop, is both very cool and very frightening. Some of the information delivered through the AR interface appears to be useful. The intensity of the advertising, though, seems utterly frightening. That the user has control over the "advertising level" they are exposed-to is encouraging, but why would anyone crank it all the way up? Would this kind of immersive hyper-marketing change our standards the way that new technologies have made us more comfortable with multi-tasking?
There are a lot of big questions to tackle in regards to Augmented Reality. ReadWriteWeb is currently working on our next premium research report on the topic of AR marketing. Watch this space for that.
Let's not waste any time before we start thinking, though, about what we want out of an Augmented future. Many of the same questions that the Web has faced will be present in AR. Do we need an AR DNS? Will advertising support the production of quality, useful content? Or will the AR future be like Keiichi Matsuda depicts in the video above? Perhaps a mix of heaven and hell, delivered through eyeglasses in between the world and our brains.
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