The App-less Future
This year Meta and Apple are expected to continue to shift their strategy away from apps and towards something more like layers that you add to your reality.
Meta are calling these Augments. They are persistent digital objects in your environment. You can think of them as a bit like widgets on your phone, easy to see at a glance and just right there when you need them.
Augments at home
You might be cooking a meal, so you float a recipe video above the chopping board. A weather forecast floats next to the kettle and you have a virtual TV screen with the big game on floating above the dishwasher. Perhaps a virtual pet would wander the worktop, providing a companion whilst you get your kitchen chores done.
Later you might be playing Fortnite on a big virtual screen, but with a virtual AI companion from the game sitting next to you on the sofa and coaching you. A giant world map of the game is on a separate screen mapped to the wall to your left.
The idea is that virtual content will become more of an ambient, layered part of our environments.
Augments at work
Augments will be super useful at work, you might have…
> A 3D model of the product your team is working on your desk. It is connected to the cloud and always shows the latest version from your team
> Holograms of your team working around you, beamed into your home office to make WFH less lonely and more collaborative and fun.
> A custom dashboard / control panel on the wall, tailored to the bespoke needs of your organisation.
Ambient Mixed Reality
Ambient computing is an old term too, for a few years we have had AI smart speakers and other smart home devices as part of an IoT (Internet of Things). The idea being that keyboards, mice and screens are replaced by voice controls and computers that can see and make decisions by themselves.
Currently people use their Mixed Reality headsets very actively. You put your headset on and focus on a single app at a time. Augments will see Mixed Reality becoming more of an ambient experience.
The AR smart home
I think over time we can expect the smart home and augments to converge, for instance..
> Spotify music visualisations showing 3D dancers/graphics on your coffee table, dancing to the music playing on your smart speaker. Feels like a front row seat at the pop concert!
> Your door bell camera feed pops up when someone rings the bell, you can see someone else in the house has already answered it so you go back to your 3D Disney movie on your virtual cinema screen.
> Customise the look of your RGB smart lights with rich 3D mixed reality interfaces that really let you nail the look and feel.
The sky’s the limit
I just can’t wait to see what people do with these, I think we are going to see some really cool, surprising use cases that no-one expected.
As the form factor of XR hardware shrinks down, we will see augments profilerate everywhere.