>>10528204Working on AR smart phone apps. The technology is already cool for basic applications and it's a fun thing to work on.
The real problem with AR that prevents people from doing anything really revolutionary though is accurate positioning.
All the cool Aftereffects promo videos you see on Youtube, of people running through a shop or a street and it's all showing you exactly where to go and pops up information right where it should, all that.
That's all a complete fantasy if you don't know where the user actually is within about a square meter and where he's facing.
GPS is absolute garbage for AR applications. Maybe the military one is better. But the public one is way too imprecise. And you can't use it indoors. Same goes for the compass in your phone. Stuff like beacons is even worse.
Apple has a feature called AR world mapping which does basically this out of the box:
>>10528239And it's really impressive and it repositions everything where you set it up.
But this visual approach all starts breaking down when you take it out of the lab and into the real world where you have different weather, different light conditions, different times of day, lights off or on, stuff getting reflected, objects getting moved and in general people or objects moving in your way. And on top of stuff not getting detected, you'll have to worry about the wrong stuff getting detected as well.
Sure, you could bypass all this, by telling the user at one point: "Put the phone down in this frame that is perfectly aligned and press this button when you're ready." But that's just unsexy.
Even if you would then show fantastical dragons that guide you all the way through the store to your cornflakes, nobody would ever actually use it. People hate these sort of set-ups. Also they'd see pretty quickly that it's not a proper solution. Turn around and press the button and your corn flakes are in the parking lot.
Also you look like a dork looking through your phone all day.
