Can you imagine what you could do with see through and/or projected AR added to the mix? It would be the whisical, funtime opposite of Daniel Suarez’ icy Daemon.
There’s a couple of things to note here: this is an “mp3 experiment” - but the mp3 really only serves to initiate, synchronize, and contextualize via the voice and music. AR could work like this - detractors confuse wanting to augment things with more or less wanting to replace all other kinds of stimulation, and that’s not necessarily in the best interest of the user.
Then there’s the element of “being in on it” while perplexing the general public that’s part of the fun of flashmobs, that actually plays to the user-exclusivity of portable AR presentation.
The key thing, thought, is the motivation in the disembodied introduction - “follow my instructions and we’ll all have a pleasant time together” - this is about having a remarkable shared experience that really depends on careful planning and scripting by the organizers, and preparation and willingness from the participants, rather than the technology which is really only a facilitator.
While the natural feature tracking on the new Ben&Jerry’s MooVision mobile AR app is impressive, the whole experience looks like it isn’t. Augmented Planet are fairly positive about the campaign for many good reasons, but I think we’re already at the stage where just augmenting a neat looking 3D model on top of something no longer provides any real “wow” moment (however technically hard it still may be). Expectations are so high from years of “faked” AR in movies, that simple models aren’t going to cut it, and a per-brand application landscape is not sustainable.
The application seems designed to a) giving you visual feedback that it has identified the tub so that b) you can then link to otherwise normal HTML web-content, where the real information lies. I have no problem using AR as visual-search with graphical feedback - I think that’s a great use-case for AR.
I’d just really like to see some actual information presented in the AR view, with some AR-dimension interaction. They could have made the words “New York” link to the city when pressed, instead of using buttons for interaction, or added a small map or globe indicating where in the world their organic cocoa comes from that I could touch to learn more. I’m just throwing these out off the top of my head, I’m not arguing that these are sensible AR interactions, but I think it’s time we worked on figuring out what sensible AR interactions are. We should really get around to solving the very difficult user interaction and user experience challenges before everyone decides our technology is a fad.
