Until now, augmented reality has so far been mostly a sci-fi vision that overlays visual information to what we see in the physical world. It’s widely perceived as a “cool and interesting feature” for brands and advertising, but doesn’t have much practicality yet. To harness the real power of AR, which includes geolocation, image recognition, we believe that a more utilitarian visual search would be next.
To design for such possibilities, we begin to question even the fundamental basis of AR. For example, what would AR become beyond a rich visual layer? Will this change people’s motivation and behavior to use AR? How can we redefine AR to be a tool to give augmented information on objects? And how we can speculate its usage in the future?
