AR has arrived, in fits and starts. Ikea has an app that lets you see, on your phone, what a piece of furniture would look like in your home. Splunk has an app that helps field workers repair industrial systems, accessing performance metrics and repair information. And somewhere, right now, someone is still playing Pokémon Go. However, this is only the beginning, very soon, AR is going to help consumers do more than furniture shop or “catch ’em all.”

All of that requires a designer to painstakingly create the virtual content. Devin Bhushan, AR engineering manager at Splunk, expects that in 2022, the average consumer will be able to make high-quality dynamic content.

“Needing designers to make everything has been the big blocker in unlocking AR for every company and every use case.”

Sammy Lee, principal product manager for Splunk AR, agrees that the democratization and commodification of content creation are on the near horizon:

“Apple already has this API to take photos, then create a model offline on a new m1 chip. All this takes a minute or two, then this perfect 3D model that looks as if a designer spent weeks on it is produced.”

Next Advance In Augmented Reality

With that technology in place, AR will hit social platforms starting next year. Overcoming Bottlenecks The fitful rollout of 5G will provide the necessary bandwidth.

“To get to high-quality models, we need the bandwidth 5G will deliver,” Lee says. “Until then, this is the year of experimentation for content creation.”

So, will we all have our personal set of AR glasses or other heads up display (HUD) next year? Not quite. Bhushan thinks that it’ll take another two or three years.

“The first version of AR glasses will be a slight upgrade of the HUD that Google Glass did in 2013,” he says.

He points out a number of potential limitations to creating vast, immersive AR experiences on glasses. To contain headset bulk and cost, headsets probably won’t have the chip power or battery life to perform complex computations. As a result, glasses will probably serve as a display paired with your phone, and the exchange of data from headset to phone could be a data choke point, making it hard to visualize large or complex 3D models. Lee agrees that early devices will have limitations. If we do get AR glasses soon, we’re not going to be seeing 3D models of anything and everything. He says,

“It’ll be more of a lesser AR experience for the time being. Maybe you’ll see directions or a Pikachu, but it’s more a proof of concept.”

Answering the question Why?

From Consumers to Enterprise Ubiquity That won’t be enough to get AR into the enterprise, notes Jesse Chor, Splunk’s VP of engineering for platform experiences. Once we get past the technical question of how to bring AR to an org, we’d better have solved the question of why.

“AR has to focus on what the end user really needs to accomplish,” Chor says. “It’s about augmenting real-world experiences with digital information, but most essentially, that information needs to be actionable.”

Splunk President of Products and Technology Shawn Bice thinks AR will deliver.

“It’s going to greatly improve a customer’s experience with data,” he says.

Imagine giving a technician in the field the ability to truly understand and quickly fix a vital piece of equipment with technical diagrams and a 3D perspective on replacement parts.

“Or think of a surveyor or tax assessor surveying a lot — aiming a phone camera at the property to connect the physical and digital world — this stuff could be game-changing.”

For more 2022 forecasts on digital technology and leadership in the emerging technology, security, IT and public sector spaces, see the Splunk 2022 Predictions page.

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AR Development

The power of Augmented Reality is something that we on eLearningworld Europe AB acknowledged several years ago. Now when the great prospects are approaching a more user-friendly design, we have started to develop the second version of our AR-solution for the SOE PublishingLab-platform for interactive books. Features from the first version you find e.g. in the book “En Fransman i Stockholm 1844-45” and the English version of the book with all AR-features will be launched in the coming weeks.

This content was originally published here.