I’m a bit worried that many AR applications are trivial - not in implementation, but in application. Visualizing tweets, pretending you’re Iron Man in front of your monitor - these are unserious applications.
Adam Greenfield has a great post in his series on the future of cities and read-write urbanism, where he calls for elements of the city to be interactive, necessitating making them “addressable, queryable, and even potentially scriptable.” Awesome.
To my thinking the logical user-interface modality for this kind of networked, interactive city is (of course) augmented reality: elements will be dense, stacked, spatial, a map interface isn’t going to cut it - there’ll be too much spatial ambiguity, and too many moving parts. If you want to report to the city that your favourite park bench is broken, point your mobile AR device at it directly. The city can provide status updates available (when it’s due to be repaired) not on some website or in a file in a basement of an office downtown open to the public between 2/4pm weekedays, but right there at the bench.
Unfortunately it doesn’t do much good for pushing AR along right this minute to wed it to a futuristic (wonderful) vision of cities, but I’d love to see more thinking along these lines: how to make AR really helpful, really useful.
