A Fork in the Augmented Reality User Experience Road

I have spent a lot of the last few years striving to drive new applications in the AR space. I started co-leading a team of over 100 developers at a major OEM determined to create a new AR device. My interests have always been in shaping the technology to fit a compelling user experience. Despite their best efforts, my experience of most AR device creation teams always comes back to what user experiences can they demo with their particular version of hardware & firmware features and industry SW APIs. Everyone believes they are doing the right thing - so we are convinced we are agile creators of compelling use case encapsulated product visions. Its like asking if you are a good engineer - no one says "no - I'm wasting the company's budget". You agile?, "Yep". Use Case Driven?, "Yep".

With that as my background,let me describe two roads AR creators have carved out and give you my two cents worth about each road. A simple way to describe these is one road believes the user experience to be optimized is the 3-D overlays appearing in sync with the real world, the augmented stuff. Those ascribing to this believe the physical characteristics of the AR device are assumed to eventually be acceptable to the user - they believe that is based on unstoppable technology trends in the universe. So they are fine with giant, heavy, hot, devices with very short battery life, at least for now. Meta 2 is a great example of a large physical device promoted by the team as one that will eventually shrink. MS HoloLens, and Magic Leap are seen as entirely acceptable by their teams because they can do 2-3 hours of great binocular 3-D overlay as a demo of what the Future holds. To partake of a genuine user experience such as 8am-8pm in a warehouse or a theme park is a leap of faith since real people would never wear such weird, bulky, hot, devices. Only what we call the Lunatic Fringe would wear something like that in a real life scenario. This approach is reasonable until the creators begin drinking the kool aid and describe their devices as if they have already conquered the ergonomic challenge. Which they often do and which they have not conquered.

Yes, I said there were two roads for AR. You can surely guess that the other road will be AR device creators which optimize the ergonomic and physical style of the device as primary and compromise on the 3-D characteristics of the augmented content in order to achieve their primary goals. Google Glass and ODG are contenders for this class of device, but I see them more as tween-ers than actually accomplishing these two goals. For example, Google Glass is essentially devoid of physical style unless you wish to appear as a Borg Drone which consumers don't and commercial users would never choose a weird looking device either. As a result Google has moved Glass to a purely commercial device where users can be told by their employers to wear something even weird required for work. That is a reasonable approach but taking it down the tween-er path if someone can actually optimize for both ergonomic and style. ODG has produced something resembling a stylish look and reduced the weight a lot compared with HoloLens, Meta 2, or Magic Leap. But it is still multiple times the weight of a pair of Oakleys for example. I think one good example of a solution achieving both goals is Vuzix. They created a device with weight and style very near Oakleys. I have both Vuzix and Oakleys. With a light weight battery on your belt the Vuzix glasses will last for 12 hours. Vuzix has been shipping such monocular glasses for a year. They have a binocular version in the secret shed out back. With either of these glasses we can run beta test of real applications in which uses would need to wear the glasses for a very long period - essentially 12 hours. As it turns out its easy for humans to believe in their inner soul that a binocular solution will come from looking at a monocular view. The big win is for users not to be distracted by a big, bulky, hot AR device. The win is for them is to be able to stay in the moment without feeling unnatural physical attributes of a device.

This is not simply black and white and there are reasons to proceed down each road. But as for me, I am a user experience, application developer and having a solution that is optimized for comfort and natural look means I can get people past the device and completely submerged into the experience. For me most of my applications require day long comfort so its a no brain-er which road I'm going down and where I will be looking for AR device partners. In the end the roads should merge with something like an Oakley style having very high quality binocular 3-D augmented content. Until then there are solutions on both AR roads.