Visualising the world

Another in a series of random thoughts on Augmented Reality, Plotting, Location, Maps and Mobile.

In terms of interest in Augmented Reality, while marketers and early adopters have leapt into AR with abandon - egged on by many developers it must be admitted; many are suggesting some caution and suggesting there is some way to go yet, especially in mobile. I'll address that in another blog, but right now I want to look at what I think is the right role for AR in terms of location services.

Location services. I love them. Having been involved in some of the earliest Location Based Services (LBS) provided in Australia, I've got a fairly solid understanding of the benefit they can provide and how useful location can be as a starting point for navigation. To my mind - information, and in this case I'll focus on restaurants, can be provided in three ways:

• As a list of restaurants (ordered in distance ideally, or name or cuisine)
• A map of these showing ideally where the restaurants are and where I am
• As AR, so when I hold my phone up - I can see these 'virtually', ideally with distance

In this example, I used Urban Spoon and yes, I live in Balmain...

Firstly, the list view. All those nice restaurants as a list. Handy. I can see their names, I can make a selection:

Secondly, these on a map so I can work out what is nearby and what is a long walk away. The map does need to be navigable so I can get more information from the dots:

Finally, as AR - showing me the restaurants ideally placed 'in space' so that I get a sense of what direction, how far and what it is like:):

While some of AR's failings were more obvious is this view (accuracy for example), it was impressive to see summary information with the link to more detail.

As pioneers in this space, I think there is a danger in overstating the benefits of AR, or in seeing this as a stand-alone offering. I think that mobile AR (in this plotting form) is a great addition to the way we can look at location services. I don't think it is a stand-alone offering.

Some key words keep coming back to me: there has to be a reason to use this. As the sole way of seeing something, I have to ask why I would bother. As an enhancement to location services, there certainly is a great benefit to this as an addition (augmentation) to my world.