Intelligent Design: What´s Augmented Reality?

Design is coming to life in ways never seen before.

Augmented reality explained.

If you’re a UX/UI designer, you’ve probably heard rumblings around augmented reality in recent months. Augmented reality is the integration of digital information with live video and the user’s environment in real time. Augmented reality recognises a visual picture, blends new information, and displays the virtual result. Versatility and adaptability are two key benefits. As augmented reality puts digital experiences on top of the real world instead of immersing you into an artificial one, you can literally be anywhere and achieve anything you want. Augmented reality is like our own personal assistant providing us with an easy way to customise our world. Designing

These platforms shed many constraints inherent in previous computing media, and come without the burdens of established UX/UI patterns. Consider a world where notifications sit in a box on your desk. Or where you read tweets at the bottom of your coffee mug. Or maybe a world without notifications and tweets at all. Augmented reality is an opportunity to design these new worlds.

The freedom with augmented reality.

Kharis O’Connell, the CEO and founder of HUMAN, a Vancouver based product and design studio focused on emerging platforms argues that we’ve gone through a period of obsession with flat design, kind of the opposite of skeuomorphism, referring to the concept of creating design elements that mimic the real world.

The only point of technology is to empower us as humans to be freer so we don’t have to sit with hunched backs and stare at flat screens and poke flat buttons. Nothing in the world is square. We’ve spent so long with everything around us squared off and somehow cold, we’ve gone into flat design and we’ve reduced even further, and I think there’s going to be a backlash to this. I mean it’s already happening, that’s why augmented reality is exciting. It frees us from

Mobile devices: The perfect site for augmented reality.

Augmented reality penetration itself will most likely be primarily driven by mobile experiences instead of wearable devices and glasses.

The mobile capability of augmented reality gives it the potential to have a similar role as mobile phones and tablets, and with that comes a user base in the hundreds of millions of users. Augmented reality is seen to be like a transparent mobile phone, with the potential to become the next evolutionary step in mobile communications and applications.

As Jan Rezab said in Forbes, “Augmented reality is the ultimate solution, as it allows you to input external content into your own reality rather than entering a separate reality. Augmented reality more closely merges into our lives, just as smartphones are now an integral part of our lives”. He makes two important points: on the one hand, augmented reality merges into our lives as it can use a widely accessible technology platform (mobile). Secondly, it provides a broad range of practical, everyday use cases. Hence, it is easier to scale in terms of technology and target market