“We are witnessing the obsolescence of advertising.” — Regis McKenna
Regis McKenna is the famed marketer behind Apple Computer. He taught Steve Jobs a thing or two about public relations and advertising.
Read More“Every day two billion people carry around an optical data input device — the smartphone Camera — connected to supercomputers and informed by massive amounts of data that can have nearly limitless context, position, recognition and direction to accomplish tasks.”
– Jacob Mullins, Shasta Ventures
With recent product and SDK announcements by Apple and Facebook, we have officially entered the 2017 edition of the Augmented Reality hype cycle. Event news sites like the New York Times and Quartz have gotten into the game with their own apps.
As a futurist and scenario planner, helping organizations understand the long-term social, economic, and political impacts that accompany disruptive technology, I feel the timing is right for all types of stakeholders in this technology — policy makers, technology producers, consumers and even just the average citizen who might be in the way of the emerging applications — to understand and get ahead of the types of ethical, legal and regulatory issues that will accompany AR applications.
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I’ve been previewing my new podcast in the “members only” section of Medium for the past three weeks. Its goal is to bring listeners from a passing familiarity of a subject to a top-percentile understanding of it in the course of a single episode featuring a deep interview with a relevant expert.
Each episode is accompanied by an article that contextualizes and introduces it. The first of those articles was made available to Medium non-members and members alike. Its companion audiocast surveys the current state of augmented reality, and features a long interview with the CEO of AR pioneer Meta. While the article has been available to anyone, the audio was initially only available to paying Medium members.
Read MoreFive years back, Google Glass’s famous launch video trained us to think of augmented reality as a flat translucence. It would be a bunch of wee announcements slapped on our field of view like Post-Its on ski goggles. The world beheld this daring vision and hit the snooze bar. AR’s next major milestone, Pokémon Go, is also all about simple superimposition (for now, anyway). So I was surprised to find the faithful at last month’s AR in Action conference almost wholly focused on holograms and photorealism. It’s a big step forward — and it’s actually starting to work.
I attended the New York City event to meet up with Meta CEO Meron Gribetz. Meta is racing Microsoft for the early lead in commercial AR. Florida-based Magic Leap is also allegedly in the hunt, having raised over a billion dollars. But having yet to ship a product, they came in for some sharp criticism back in December, followed by bemused head-scratching, which continues to this day.
Subsequent to the conference, I sat down with Meron in Meta’s Silicon Valley HQ to record a long interview — which now is part of an eight-episode audio series I’m producing to accompany my new novel, After On. I set the novel nine seconds into the future, as this let me feature all kinds of present-tense science and technology. I figured this would also let me stuff my book full of 20-page digressions on how cooooool AR, synthetic biology, quantum computing, and other fields are (or rather, will be. You know — nine seconds from now).
Read MoreBy Dan Newman, Principal Analyst of Futurum Research and CEO, Broadsuite Media Group
Just as Niantic, Inc. brought Pokémon to life for users in the real world, thanks to augmented and virtual reality platforms, a business can now bring innovative ideas to life that were previously unattainable. The potential for business applications with AR and VR technologies is limitless, especially as engineers continue to improve design and usability. In all my years as a tech analyst/junkie, I’ve never been more excited about the potential of technology than I am now about new tools that can reinvent the workplace.
