{"id":436,"date":"2018-07-30T12:58:52","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T10:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/craftcoders.app\/?p=436"},"modified":"2024-08-14T13:37:46","modified_gmt":"2024-08-14T11:37:46","slug":"three-ways-to-do-ar-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/craftcoders.app\/three-ways-to-do-ar-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Ways To Do Augmented Reality Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The please-don’t-sue-us disclaimer<\/b>: This post is a personal interpretation of a scientific work applied to actual use cases, based on information available online. It is not an intention of the author, to belittle the technological achievements of any company mentioned below. Non-compliance with a definition of AR spread in the scientific community does not make any application less valuable to its user.<\/i><\/p>\n

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Augmented Reality is a pretty controversial topic. On the one hand, you have Google and Apple going out of their way to convince you that their AR-Framework is all advanced and futuristic. And “just think of the opportunities”, and “future begins today”. On the other hand, your own reality is still not augmented much, is it? Somehow, you don’t see facebook profile info hovering over your friends’ heads. And if that’s too much to expect unless you are in an episode of Black Mirror, you could at least have some product info show up when you scan your favorite grocery store’s racks. Or a nice AR-Dressing room for an online apparel store. Just anything other than that omnipresent IKEA Place app<\/a>. But the market still doesn’t have that much to offer. Of course, we could put our patience pants on and wait, because the augmented future could come any minute now. But what’s the fun in that? Especially if instead we can dig out all the things that went wrong with the technology in the last couple of years and enjoy our ride to the AR-failure town. Now that’s what I call entertaining, so grab all the snobbism left over from that time you found an antipattern in someone else’s code, and let’s go.<\/p>\n

The Theory<\/h3>\n

I know, I just said we are going to have fun. But first things first: we are not going after AR-apps only for them implementing a ridiculous use case. That would be a very subjective approach. For all you know, there might be someone who likes taking selfies with virtual perfume bottles (here is a link<\/a> in case you are one of them). And I dare you to explain how Pok\u00e9mon GO fans are more superior than those of AR Mosquito Hunter (App Store<\/a> and Google Play<\/a>, thank me later). I guess what I want to say, is that weird use cases are not the place to get judgy since you never know who for and how they might be useful. Instead, we are going to take the high road and go about judging others from a more objective, scientific point of view. To do so, we will have to build up our knowledge basis first, and this guy is going to help us out:<\/p>\n

Image via http:\/\/ronaldazuma.com\/<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

His name is Ronald Azuma, and if you think Augmented Reality is the next big thing, he should be your hero. In 1997 Azuma published a paper that has been referenced in almost all the AR-related literature ever since. A Survey of Augmented Reality<\/a> reflects on the technology’s state of the art at the time and provides an exhaustive overview of applications, characteristics, and challenges of AR. But the reason Azuma’s paper got referenced over and over again was the definition, which managed to separate reality augmentation from whatever the hell people would call AR to make it sound cool. So let’s hear the definition.<\/p>\n

Azuma defines AR as “systems that have the following three characteristics:<\/p>\n