Christine Perey
Christine Perey has over 18 years experience working in emerging multimedia communications markets. In the early days, she was the publisher and editor of The QuickTime Forum (1991-1993) and the founder of The QuickTime Movie Festival. More recently, since chairing the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networks, Christine serves as an expert to the W3C Social Web Working Group. She is also the chair of the ISMAR Mobile Committee. She is co-founder of Mobile Monday Switzerland.
Over the past two years, Christine has authored the Mobile Social Networking reports published by Informa Telecoms & Media. Perey performs research and provides guidance to executives, entrepreneurs and investors globally. For more information, visit PEREY Research & Consulting.
Shopping with AR
Much like the farm wife with her Sears catalog, consumers will be able to use simple AR applications to make more informed buying decisions. Some items are well-suited to commerce with AR, but others need image recognition and databases containing all the information a consumer might need. Expect retail outlets and brands that provide fast-moving consumer goods to be among those eager to exploit mobile AR for shopping.
User interfaces for AR
There is a risk that talk about haptic interfaces and heads up displays for AR will seem like just hype, and certain industry participants fear that over promising and under-delivering could send AR in the same direction as Virtual Reality went a decade ago: into oblivion. That said, new ways of interacting with digital data on the real world are possible and not hype to those who work on them. To appreciate the full potential of new user interaction for AR, a test drive is valuable.
Look through the AR window
The hottest applications for AR in the next year will closely resemble familiar human interactions with the physical world. We interact with objects in our environment. Then we move through space, get to where we are going with the fewest detours, or, perhaps to discover places and landmarks (points of interest) that would otherwise have been overlooked. We also enjoy interacting with one another.
See It, Follow It
RFID remains an interesting option to supplement other tracking technologies for indoor applications and situations which are relatively tightly controlled (e.g., teaching/training, museums, entertainment venues, architecture and urban planning). Tracking for consumer AR applications in uncontrolled environments when all the user has is a camera phone remains a very, very challenging area of research and we should expect to continue seeing major developments in this field in the year ahead before it is gradually integrated into our everyday AR applications.