Being in AR together

Let's say there are two types of Augmented Reality. There's a type that just involves you, such as facefilter AR. And there's AR that involves someone else too. The latter is what interests me most. And it's what occurs when you use the back facing camera to experience AR. You're looking around and other people might appear in your augmented scenery. Or the AR even depends on that to happen.

But what do these other people need to do? Do you instruct them what to do? And how do you know how to instruct them? Because shared AR experiences not as straightforward as single user AR effects, I've created a series of icons to easily explain to users of a shared AR experience what to do and what to expect from each other.

The classic shared AR experience: two people experiencing the same augmented world. The AR doesn't even need to be synchronised. But it can be. Nothing can go wrong here. And we know this type of AR since 2009. Let's focus on involving people into the AR scene.

New since a couple of years is the option to augment people using bodytracking. We've all seen the instagram posts in which people convincingly wear digital fashion, even without having a clue about their augmented presence. Wearing fashion always works. But being a circus performer, without knowing what you're doing, is not easy. Audio cues can help.

But in order to understand the audio cues, or knowing what to do anyway, you just need to have a peek at someone else first. Then you know what happens to you, when you stand there being the actor in someone elses' AR world.

The easy solution: install a "magic mirror".

But the requirement of a big screen kills the scalabilty of AR. It's one of the great benefits of mobile AR that it can be rolled out globally. All that's needed is the right instruction to find the right place or context. The required hardware is in everyones pocket. The whole world as your playground!

In public space you might want to anonymize the people in the image. And still, you cannot really point your phone at other people for too long. Let's await the moment we're all wearing AR glasses, then this genre of AR will flourish!

Using unaware people in public space as NPCs has its limitations. Being together with other people who're using their device to access the same shared AR scene is one thing. But then still you might feel uncomfortable when someone is pointing at you and you don't know how you appear. That can be solved by technically forcing all participants to so what you're seeing on others, is what others are seeing on you.

Sometimes there's no need to let everyone use their phone. But it can still be a shared AR experience. Sounds help achieve that.

And there can be practical reasons why not having a phone in your hand is a better way to join the experience.

When people think about multi-user AR, they often think about this classic: a shooter. But unfortunately, when using AR on a smartphone, the high speed chases depicted in the After Effects clips do not really feel that exciting when you're trying it for real. It can be frustrating to be blasted over by speedy fireballs coming from an area outside of your FOV. A possible solution: slowing it down. Like in the Global PONG AR experience: https://sndrv.com/pong/

And why always fighting? Here's a shared AR example that's the opposite of a fight, there's no competition not even a score counter. All that counts and what is rewarded is the togetherness: https://www.instagram.com/p/CaqOx9GoPMK/

Finally, this last icon depicts a little difficult to grasp multi-user scenario. Especially in cases when there's not an easy distinguishable human-like avatar to interact with. With mobile AR, capturing a gesturing human is not easy. But a distant interaction can be as basic as just someone's hand iteracting with you while being elsewhere.

The icon-set is going to be an instrument on the MeetYourStranger.com website. There you'll find a growing collection of shared AR experiences to enjoy together, with friends or collegues, during a coffee break or at any other occasion that is suitable for short get together in AR intermezzo. Each friday a new experience will be announced. So stay tuned!