OPINION
How important is AR for everyday life?
DOESN’T WANT AUGMENTED REALITY TO BE A SLIDE SHOW IN HIS HEAD… HE WANTS SOMETHING MUCH MESSIER
Apple’s idea that augmented reality (AR) is maybe the most important technology of the future continues unabated. In a new interview with The New York Times, Tim Cook talked about how it could be used to improve conversations between two people. “You and I are having a great conversation right now,” he said to interviewer Kara Swisher, “Arguably, it could even be better if we were able to augment our discussion with charts or other things to appear.”
Would it, Tim? Are we 100% sure about that? He’s used the word ‘arguably’, so I guess there’s wriggle room, but honestly there are very few conversations with another human where I’ve just wished there could be charts as part of it. Not just charts – I think if someone started using reaction GIFs or emoji to emphasise their point in AR while I was talking to them, I might snap my Apple Glasses™ in two right on my head.
I thought that Tim maybe meant that it could be useful for him to be able to throw up charts or graphics for an audience to see during a conversation between two people on stage, and then I realised I’d just invented Keynote, and I think Tim already knows about that.
Now, I can believe that Tim Cook, perhaps the world’s greatest operations manager, really would see being able to put up timelines and visualisations as a boon in many of his conversations. And perhaps so do other Apple execs, and the engineers… but I don’t think it makes it all the way to your average consumer with that raison d’être and lands with anything other than a shrug. Right now, I don’t think there’s a big pent-up demand for AR – the only uses of it I’ve seen are people playing with Pokemon Go or that Ikea furniture app.
There’s this idea that we’d all love glasses that tell us everything about the person we’re talking to, or topic under discussion. But I only like this idea when I’ve forgotten someone’s name. The rest of the time, it feels distinctly insufferable. I don’t need glasses to correct me if I’m wrong, or even to back me up with stats
There’s this idea that we’d all love AR glasses that tell us about a person or topic
that show I’m right – especially since we all know that information online can be equally wrong, and that data can be just as misleading as a sentence.
A few people have talked about how the smartphone is killing the pub debate. A friendly argument over which film won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1998 is now so easily solved. Two people with wildly different memories could dine (or, more aptly, drink) on that for an hour. While
I’d love smart glasses that improve this conversation, just telling me the answer doesn’t do that. Is there any future for computing that augments the imprecision of human reality, rather than ironing it out?
(It was Titanic. But I haven’t looked it up).
ABOUT MATT BOLTON
Matt is the editor for Apple and home tech at T3 and has been charting changes at Apple since his student days. He’s sceptical of tech industry hyperbole, but still gets warm and fuzzy on hearing “one more thing”.