Chris Rawlinson and Dave Duarte were kind enough to invite me to speak at the most recent 27 Dinner in Cape Town. I spoke for a short while on AR applications, showcasing the December issue of Esquire magazine and talking briefly about the General Electric, Mini Cooper and the work we did for Wordsworth Books. The point that I tried to make was that for the most part, AR applications tend to be gimmicks – using the technology to attract the attention. The biggest problem with this is that we are using technology for the sake of technology – at best retrofitting the message or post-rationalizing why it is relevant – and end up with something that has initial wow factor, but no compelling reason to continue engaging and therefore ending up with something that is not sustainable.

As we continue looking for new ways to explore this space, we’re constantly asking “why?”… in a lot of the examples we see, the marker simply acts as a way of kick-starting the content on the screen. So how is this any different from the usual navigation that you find on a site – clicking a button or holding up a marker – both could essentially achieve the same thing. In the Esquire example, holding up the markers gives you access to exclusive content, but if you took away the markers from the magazine how different would it be from the CD’s of additional content that magazines sometime include? Make no mistake, it’s has been beautifully designed and crafted, and moving the markers about gives you some cool effects, but then you would expect something special from an 80MB download of custom built software.

So why are we calling these experiences augmented reality? I guess since you can see yourself on the screen via the webcam, and the interaction is triggered by the marker that you’re holding, you could, at a stretch, call it reality. And since we’re adding stuff on top of it, it is augmenting. But there is no added value in having the two combined in one place. The US Postal Service have an augmented reality application that uses markers to create virtual boxes that you can use to measure up packages you want to send, which is useful, but only if you don’t own a tape measure. I can see the point of an application like Layar – relevant information is superimposed over my view of the world – the reality as I see it has been augmented.

Which brings me eventually to the main point. I think the name augmented reality, for the most part, is a misnomer. Reality is not being augmented, we are simply using our reality to augment the experience. So perhaps what we should be calling them are Reality Augmented Experiences.