Have you noticed how specific Google’s sub-pages are nowadays? I often find I have to go to Google Scholar, even to find a paper I know by name and author, because their standard search won’t return it. Google is good for web-pages, but Google Scholar is needed for finding papers.
Do you remember how bad service provider landing pages used to be in the bad old days of the internet, before Google? They used to try to provide links to all kinds of categories of information, so you would stay on their site when looking for information, and in trying to solve everybody’s information browsing on a couple of pages they left everyone unsatisfied. If you hadn’t heard of search-engines, you might confuse this sorry mess for “the internet”, and wonder what all the fuss was.
Then WAP came along. It was promised as “the internet on your phone”, but it was really the same deal, only worse. I only knew one search engine and it was rubbish, so I was stuck in my operator’s walled garden. WAP was crap.
Right now AR isn’t “hyperlinking the real world” either, as we’ve been promising. It feels a little bit like the “AR browser” model is following the same dead-end track. There’s one application trying to provide information to people looking for restaurants, geo-located messages, train time-tables and photos all through the same template, using the same interactions.
I’m betting soon we start to see really specific applications with AR functionality. I don’t mean apps for interacting with one brand’s ice-cream, but applications that take on only one class of problem - city visitor guide for instance - and try to solve it really, really well. When the problem is well defined, the specific solutions: the interactions that work best, the minimal acceptable tracking accuracy, the amount of data to present, how to present it and interact with it, all become easier to determine, and the general solution may well naturally arise from those specific investigations.
I’m not saying we don’t need AR browsers, but I am saying that right now they think they’re Internet Explorer when they’re really behaving like AOL, and they should be trying to be Google Scholar. If that makes any sense.
