Coming back from holiday season, a colleague of mine was wearing a brand new gear watch he received from Santa. I received a GPS watch from my brother who is a professor of Latin and Greek literature, and not really a fan of technology. A few days ago, on the subway in Milan, I saw the first person wearing Google Glass. They are here and closer than we think: devices and tools that create a new reality.
Augmented and Mixed Reality
The border between the real and virtual worlds is becoming thinner and thinner. What was called virtual just in the recent past, now becomes part of reality – even the reality itself. I mean that the real, concrete device we can wear (watches, glasses, gloves, …), let us be immersed in a new reality that belongs to us, where we move into more and more naturally.
In practice we have two components in a continuum between the two opposite, discrete ends of reality and virtuality:
- the augmented reality, where the real world is augmented with digital (virtual) information,
- the augmented virtuality, where a virtual world is augmented with real world information
With the first, perception of the user’s environment can be enhanced, enriched and made more transparent to the surrounding data (e.g. advertising, information and resources related to places, objects and contexts).
User experience
At Wolters Kluwer, we saw the same process with smartphones and tablets. They rapidly went into everybody hands and we addressed our endeavors trying to provide the best user experience to our customers when using our products in mobility.
Now when we speak about mobile devices we have to think to a broader set. Due to the rapid development of sensor and communication technology (Google has just acquired Nest Labs, a producer of thermostats and smoke detectors), mobile devices are becoming more and more aware of environment, user’s context and information resources near-by. Apart the predominant visual nature of such mobile devices (glasses or other head-mounted displays already create a highly immersive experience of the mixed reality environment) the augmented real world can be enriched also with auditory, haptic and even olfactory information (which Christian Dirschl referred to in his last post).
Wolters Kluwer is experimenting with Google Glass, as John Barker reported in his post, and a lot of ideas for solutions for our customers will come out. In this endeavor, we need to adopt a user centric approach in design solutions with these kind of devices as well: in mobile and busy situations the mixed reality information content has to be something that is very important or useful for the user, especially if receiving the information or interacting with it moves the user’s attention away from what is happening in the real world or from the tasks executed in the real world.
When you have to be right
I see the user experience and acceptance perspective of mixed reality services are still at the beginning of research studies, that were mostly focused on usability issues of individual explorers.
If provided at the right time and in the right place, mixed reality information can undoubtedly offer the user rich, useful, pleasant and amazing experiences. In mobile contexts use cases vary from critical, urgent and demanding tasks to leisure oriented activities. Hence, it is important to understand in which situations extra information can be offered to the user, what kind of information and its level of detail, without making it invasive. I think we have an immense opportunity in applying UX techniques also to the mixed reality solutions we envision for our customers.