Augmented Reality (AR) technology catapulted to the mainstream with the launch of Niantic’s Pokemon Go, an AR mobile game for iOS and Android. The following year the revolution was cemented with the release of ARKit and ARCore, frameworks created by Apple and Google respectively which significantly improved the development process to create AR experiences. The excitement surrounding AR is continuing to grow while the technology improves and more apps are constantly being released for consumers. According to a consumer report by IDC, the latest projections predict the AR/VR market will hit $60.55 billion by 2023 with AR being responsible for most of the growth. On the surface it seems that we are at the dawn of the golden era in Augmented Reality, but is that really the case?
Augmented Reality - Novelty or Necessity?
Currently, the entire AR industry is facing the same issue: although there are many AR experiences available to consumers, only a few provide any legitimate value to the end-user. It is clear that there is plenty of excitement about AR, but how are users engaging with the apps once the novelty wears off? For example, Ikea Place, a popular AR shopping experience released by Ikea in 2017, only has 370,000 monthly active users (MAU) worldwide. Ikea is not the only company to experience this frustration, nearly every AR solution released to consumers has struggled with attracting and retaining users. This sentiment is common throughout the industry, many of the attendees at AWE USA 2018, the largest annual AR/VR conference, expressed concerns that AR technology is not growing as quickly as expected. Furthermore, many companies have confirmed that they are having difficulty convincing investors to believe in the technology, claiming that the technology is not providing enough value and not generating enough additional revenue for the customer. People are buying furniture from Ikea, regardless if they are able to see the products through AR app or not. After initial marketing buzz, neither me nor any of my Y-generation or millennial friends has ever used the Ikea app for making a purchase decision.
One serious concern is the shortage of useful AR applications outside of gaming. This problem can be observed on the Apple AppStore as only 3 of the 10 most popular ARKit apps are non-gaming. The overwhelming popularity of gaming makes it difficult to justify releasing a non-gaming experience.
The Reason(s)
The waning interest could obviously be explained by the fact that augmented reality has only recently been adopted by consumers, and thus the technology is not mature enough to provide value to businesses. Technology needs time to evolve and adapt to the changing needs of the market. Fortunately, many of the industry leaders are investing vast amounts of time and resources to develop augmented reality products, solutions, and hardware, therefore one can assume that it will only be a matter of time before the technology becomes ubiquitous.
Despite the monumental push to advance the technology, the technical challenges are not the only barriers preventing mass adoption of augmented reality. By looking at the industry from a non-technical perspective, we can safely assume there are also many social and economic factors plaguing augmented reality.The passive reliance on the tech giants to resolve the problems with AR may lead to a point where the primary beneficiaries of the technology will be the tech giants themselves thus marginalizing the benefits for consumers.
The technical imperfections of augmented reality lead to the formation of the AR Cloud concept by Orin Inbar, the CEO of Super Ventures. We believe that by bridging the gap between the expectations and the current possibilities of AR, we will successfully execute the AR Cloud concept and thus create a unified AR Ecosystem. Let’s try to deep dive into current situation and try to define most important challenges which AR industry is struggling with right now.
Primitive AR experience and technical gaps
Even though a lot of companies (even the top tech giants) are investing a lot of resources into AR technology development, the brutal truth is: AR experiences are still very primitive. What do we mean by primitive? For them to be mature and sophisticated, they would have to meet the following basic technical requirements:
Persistency - AR content has to persist in the real world, irrespective of when and where the user is engaging in the content. Practically, this means that if a user plants some AR content on a particular street corner today, other users will be able to see that same content the next day, and in the same exact location.This particular requirement is actually a major roadblock for many potential applications of augmented reality.
Occlusion - do you remember Pokemon GO? Have you ever tried to walk closer to the Pokemon? Have you ever noticed how if your friend steps in front of your phone camera (clearly in between you and the pokemon), the AR Pokemon is still displayed in front of your friend even though that makes no sense, spatially? This is a perfect example of one of the thousands of AR apps that lack true immersion, and true occlusion. To put this bluntly, AR content should understand the real world and react to the dynamically changing environment, just like a real world object does.
Multiplayer and multi-user - AR can be fun and exciting, but at the end of the day, users are not sharing the same AR experience across devices. Enabling multiplayer AR experiences will open the floodgates for many great AR experiences/applications where collaboration is a must-have.
Cross-platform - without the possibility of creating unified AR logic for many devices and platforms to use simultaneously, creating generic vertically integrated AR apps or solutions will only fragment the AR ecosystem. Enabling the deployment of one project to many platforms and devices will facilitate content and AR experience creation, so that providers can spend more time bringing value instead of coding and rewriting the verticals for many systems and platforms.
Remote placement and control of the content - remote placement and control over AR content is another building-block for making creation of AR experience much easier, for both technical and non-technical people. Users should be able to insert their content to the AR Cloud without the need to be present at the desired location.
So how can we expect augmented reality technology to run, if it can’t even walk yet? These technical obstacles have to be resolved and addressed as soon as possible to provide a strong technical framework for creating AR experiences which are robust, cross-platform and valuable for mainstream, and industry alike.
Fancy smartglasses
While smartphones give users a tremendous amount of value, providing the right information, at the right time, the right place with hands-free technology solidifies smartglasses’ place in the evolution of human-computer interaction.
There are plenty of smartglasses already available on the market, the latest being the first edition of the long awaited Magic Leap. Some of them bring really powerful possibilities for AR, but there is one common issue with all smartglasses available at the moment: they look ugly - period. If AR headsets are to be accepted by the mainstream, they have to look like regular glasses (or cool enough to not make you look like a nerd) and be functional enough (by having a lot of apps to use and content to view) to justify wearing them. Smartglasses users must be given access to AR apps and functionalities to make smartglasses usable out of the box. AR developers should be able to deploy their solutions for many types and models of glasses at once. Additionally, battery life of the AR headset has to be long enough for several hours of use. All those serious hardware challenges have to be resolved before Augmented Reality will be ready for a mainstream tech revolution.
Who owns AR?
Augmented Reality has a chance to become a new revolutionary technology, like the Internet or smartphones. Adding a new digital content displayed on top of the real world causes many privacy and governance concerns. Should the AR world be centralized, governed by central authorities? Or should it be open-source and freely managed by the community? How can we protect our privacy and property against unwanted AR content and users? These are all issues that the new generation of Augmented Reality technology has to resolve.
Security and transparency
The purpose of building new Augmented Reality platform or ecosystem is enabling the exchange of goods and services between the entire AR community. This new economy within the digital dimension introduces a lot of new business opportunities for the community. Of course an AR platform where business is transacted will require a secure transaction system with an unforgeable currency as the payment medium. To build a secure transaction system for this AR ecosystem, we look to harness the blockchain as the technical backbone for transactions between users.
Additional value resulting from building the onchain economy is transparency, coming from a distributed ledger as well as clear, fair, economic rules written into smart contracts.
Community
Although the Augmented Reality community (users, developers, startups, companies, content creators) is rapidly growing, there is no single, unified and strong community working together for the common vision of a new generation Augmented Reality platform. If new AR ecosystem is to succeed, every community member, from AR developers to the end-users, should have real benefits from building the new platform and using it on a daily basis. Additionally, the new platform itself should not be governed by small, closed group of people. It should be community-driven, in order to ensure project development compliant with the community vision (Crowd Wisdom). In fast changing technological environment, it is crucial for the leaders of the new generation of AR to work together with the community on the currently most important issues for the whole community members. Obviously, the community itself should have real impact on the most important decisions regarding the ecosystem development and evolution.
Decentralization
Running sophisticated Augmented Reality scenarios requires not only AR logic (code) and content (3D models, videos etc.) but also enormous amount of storage and computing resources, specially for the content rendering and storage. Building centralized supercomputer and data centers seems not to be the best approach. With the development of blockchain and decentralized computing networks, it is technically possible to run complex Augmented Reality scenarios using real cloud approach, when users’ device is used only as presentation layer and all heavy computing is outsourced to the powerful remote network. It seems that decentralization is the most natural way to enable technical resources and cloud approach for the new AR ecosystem.
Solution: The arVerse Project
The arVerse Project is an initiative aiming to create a new generation of Augmented Reality ecosystem and platform. It is a proposal of the AR Cloud concept implementation to address both technical issues and the economic and social aspects of the next generation of Augmented Reality technology.
The key point of The arVerse Project is to build an open, community-driven and decentralized Augmented Reality ecosystem. The community will not only benefit from using this next generation AR platform. It will have real decision making power on project development decisions and rules governing The arVerse Ecosystem.
Blockchain is one of the pillars of the project, enabling the creation of a decentralized, transparent and secure platform for deploying and experiencing the next generation of Augmented Reality. Implementation of the Digital Dimension concept will resolve the technical gaps and allow us to build robust and powerful Augmented Reality experiences for both mobile devices and smartglasses.
Thanks to the blockchain and 5G technology, AR experiences will leverage the cloud approach, outsourcing heavy computing and storage problem to a remote network called the arVerse Rendering Network.
The decentralized marketplace will act as a single and secure place for exchanging goods and services used within the platform, with the arVerse Coin as it’s digital, finite and unforgeable digital currency.
The arVerse Project is an open-source and community-driven project and therefore anyone will be able to contribute to the development of this new generation of AR technology. Contributions could be anything - from developing new features, to simply providing ideas and feedback to the community; regardless of your technical abilities we would love for you to help us. We invite you to work with us to build a future that leverages the power of augmented reality to enhance our lives. Please visit The arVerse Project website to learn more about the project and please subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date with development of The arVerse Project!