Design Principles for Augmented Reality (Part 2)
“How Might We use Augmented Reality — Part 2”.
There are many great suggestions for how we might use Augmented Reality (AR). Luke Wroblewski initiated a super interesting conversation about this, and ideas are pouring in from designers worldwide.
In an earlier article, I categorised some of these ideas and came up with a bunch of new ones based on these categories.
Afterwards, I wondered whether AR would be necessary to implement these ideas. You could do it with AR — but would it actually be better than existing alternatives? Or would it be a gimmick?
Please bear with me :) I know this “part 2” looks a lot like part 1, but in fact it’s supposed to do something entirely different. Part 1 merely categorised a bunch of ideas with no reference to feasibility or value. Part 2 is an attempt to derive 1st pass design principles for AR, to allow us to actually evaluate whether an idea would be worth doing in AR or not.
What can AR do better than anything else?
If we want to make killer AR apps / services, I think we need to answer some fundamental questions, such as:
- what utility/value can only AR provide?
- what user needs can AR fill better than any other technology?
- which user segments can benefit the most from AR?
To try and find possible answers to these questions, I did an ideation session with my friend Heine Gundersen. The results are in this mind map v2 (and below, in the image). I don’t claim that these results are “The Truth” — merely that they are a contribution to the conversation.
Design Principles
I think the following could be valid principles for designing for AR:
- AR is good for showing information “for your eyes only” — could be for privacy reasons, or because others don’t need to see it)
- AR is good for showing information that can best be understood in context — e.g. overlaying assembly instructions on a motherboard so you can mount the CPU correctly, or inserting virtual furniture into your house so you can see how it would look, walk around it, etc. This is pretty classic AR.
- AR is good for situations where information changes frequently, and you need computational power to process data fast enough — e.g. you are watching a movie in Paris. The audio and subtitles are in French. AR could enable you to get realtime English translations overlaid on a dynamic situation
I should note that I think the three principles apply to visual augmented reality only. Because we might also use audio or tactile information (force feedback) to augment reality. For example: a GPS app using audio to tell you which lane to take on the freeway, is a technology adding information to reality = augmenting reality.
Perhaps this should also be a part of the discussion about AR?
Thanks for reading!
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Please do leave a comment, suggestion or ideas if you have thoughts about ways to make cool Augmented Reality stuff
