AWE (Augmented World Expo) is the world’s largest conference and expo dedicated to Augmented Reality, and its 2nd European incarnation kicked off in Munich, Germany this October. The conference attracted 115 speakers, 90 exhibitors and some 1500 attendees from all over the world; among them; Kenneth Aastrøm and Hans-Martin Erlandsen from EGGS. In this article, we will share the most interesting findings from the conference, as well as why we think Augmented Reality is finally ready for UX design projects.
The Benefits of Augmenting Reality
We live in an increasingly interconnected world thanks to technological breakthroughs like mobile computing, the internet, and GPS. Yet, the digital realm remains separated, only accessible through entry points like terminals or screens. This means that a person has to decide between being present in the real world or focused on a screen, which can lead to impractical situations where they end up being completely oblivious to the other.
Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology where computer-generated content is integrated into a person’s experience, typically as overlaid images and graphics. This synthesis of the real world and digital content has many advantages and unique use cases, such as allowing the person to remain focused on the real world while they can receive context-specific information, enhancing their situational awareness, providing entertainment and much more. AR is different from Virtual Reality (VR), where the user is completely immersed in a digital world. By having the potential to transform our computing paradigm, AR may represent the next computational paradigm, Spatial Computing, where the world, instead of the screen, is our interface.
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Although AR has gained traction in recent years, it has been a common feature in science fiction for many decades and has for instance been used in military aviation since the 1970’s; showing important information to the pilot about the aircraft’s speed, height, heading, and horizon. Many user interfaces in computer video games can also be described as AR, where they show information to the player on top of the environment, with common features being a map, health-bars, chat, in-game objectives. Source: AWE 2017.
The adoption of AR in both the commercial and industrial sector has been slow to take off, mainly due to several technological and design hurdles such as expensive and heavy AR headsets with poor ergonomics, poor battery life and field-of-view and lack of exemplary use-cases. Fortunately, there is much progress within the field, and from what we have seen in AWE 2017, most of these issues are now solved.
Return On Investment of AR
A definite indication that AR is now maturing as a technology, are the evaluations of pilot projects done by different companies. These pilot projects, which were shared at AWE 2017, have been done within industrial contexts to see if AR can improve the efficiency and performance of workers, and the results are, to put it mildly, promising.
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Source: EGGS