Is Augmented Reality The Next Second Life?

When I see augmented reality concepts and applications I think of that demo I saw in the mid 90s about interactive TV where we were told that people in the future would be buying the clothes and products they saw in the soaps they were watching at the press of a button. That didn’t happen.

Many applications like Layar (pictured) seem to have been built just because you can layer information on the visual but not to make things better. There is a lot of hype about services like Layar but personally I don’t see the point. We seem to be getting into a Second Life style bubble with the technology and people and companies are running away with the concept without truly working out what the end user wants and needs.

I think application designers need to remember that online retail sites don’t look like offline stores (which was predicted in the mid 90s) and Facebook doesn’t look like a coffee morning. I still think that a map with some information on it is more useful than a data ridden video of the view I can see clearly myself anyway.

Thoughts?