Augmented Reality on Michigan Ave.

This weekend I went Christmas shopping on Michigan Ave. and I decided to try out a couple iPhone augmented reality apps during my trip. The Magnificent Mile is a high traffic shopping area with a good mix of shops, restaurants and entertainment venues. With all of these different points around me I'd have access to a lot of data to play with as I walked around the area.

Augmented Reality Apps

Augmented reality on smartphones is essentially taking your phone's camera feed and overlaying graphical information on top of it. Most of the apps I list out below deal with your location. That means these apps use GPS to find your location, then take your camera feed and the digital compass capabilities and figure out where to lay out the data on the screen. It's pretty interesting stuff.

I had several different types of augmented reality apps on my iPhone. I had some venue review apps, like Yelp and Urbanspoon. I also had Wikitude, which overlays Wikipedia information on top of geotagged points of interest. Similar to Wikitude, I had Layar's augmented reality browser, which hooks into Wikipedia data. Layar also has a plug-in for showing tweets nearby. I also wanted to check out some of Google's Favorite Places so I downloaded NeoReader's app for scanning QR codes.

I started up north by the Water Tower Place. Right off the bat I realized that there would be no subtle way for me to use augmented reality with my phone. You have to point your device at the 'horizon'... which actually means a little bit higher than eye level. So essentially I was walking around with my phone held at arm's length in front of me. As you move the phone around from one direction to the next the data on the screen changes, so you have to keep an eye out on the display the whole time.

I started out with the review based apps. Yelp has a feature called Monocle that uses AR to display quick restaurant reviews around you. Urbanspoon has a similar feature. These apps worked pretty well, I noted that they were fairly accurate in direction and distance. One bad thing was that the number of data points on the screen was a bit much at times. You can set filters to limit the types of restaurants and places that get displayed, but in a densely populated area the AR items can quickly overtake your whole screen.

The Wikipedia based apps were a bit of bust. Both Wikitude and Layar's Wikipedia plug-in failed to show any real data around me, even though I was near actual points of interest like the Museum of Contemporary Art, Water Tower Place, or the John Hancock Center. The best these apps could show me was information for 'nearby' locations like Millenium Park to the south and Lincoln Park to north, which actually weren't that close to me at all.

Google's Favorite Places was also a bust. I was under the impression that the Favorite Places program had rolled out in Chicago and I would be able to find QR codes on windows of certain venues around the city. I had a list of places around Michigan Ave. but every one I checked out didn't actually have a decal sticker on the window. That was a bit disappointing.

The most interesting tool of all of them was definitely Layar's Twitter plug-in, Tweeps Around. With this app I could see tweets around me and find some pretty interesting tidbits of data. The problem was... most of these tweets weren't relevant to the location! I only saw one or two tweets about people actually shopping on Michigan Ave., the rest were just random bites of nonsense. The tweet that got me the most excited was one I saw near the Apple Store. Someone tweeted that they had just dropped off their computer at the store. Not too much there in that actual tweet but it shows a glimpse of the potential behind people geotagging relevant tweets around the city. Imagine being able to take the 'pulse' of the area based on tweets around you. Say for example you're on Michigan Ave. shopping, and you're thinking of going to the Apple Store at some point. If you see that there are a lot of tweets coming from the store that the place is "packed" you can plan accordingly, either by giving yourself extra time to shop there or skipping it altogether.

Overall Experience

Overall, 'augmented reality' itself didn't add too much value for me. There was a bit of a 'wow' factor at first, but that novelty quickly faded. The review based apps would have worked just as well for me without the augmented reality factor. Same goes for Layar's Twitter app. One thing I did notice was that there was a lot of 'noise' in the data being presented to me. There was a lot of information available, but it was cluttered and at times irrelevant. My small iPhone screen was quickly overwhelmed by labels and data that didn't really enhance my experience.

We're bound to see a huge growth in location based services as more data is geotagged on the internet. The key to all these services will be to figure out how best to filter all this data and present it to the user. Sure, 'augmented reality' is a cool way to present data, but I would much rather have a service that actually offers highly relevant and useful information to me and my current location.