Why is Augmented Reality Misunderstood: Understanding AR

Posted by Avatar Digital on December 28th, 2020

Augmented Reality, although it’s a word many know, isn’t a concept that is already understood in the mainstream and it’s just really grasped in tight circles.

There are a lot of reasons that make this happen, and throughout this article we thought on writing about these variables, commenting on how they play the part in making AR a misunderstood technology that is evolving slower than it should due to these factors.

If this sounds like your cup of tea, then read below and think about the implications of each variable we are going through, you’ll see many cases in which these play a part in detriment of AR adoption by the mainstream.

The Initial Flops of Augmented Reality: Too Early For Success

AR is an excitement technology that no doubt has the power to revolutionize the world.

As it stands now, it is a technology that can add value to everyone’s daily lives, but there was once a time in which this wasn’t true simply because AR was in its early stages.

We all know every new technology or industry takes a while to mature, and while many technologies spend these days being adopted by the fringe of the most early adopter pioneers out there, AR went too early to the mainstream, and this was one of the factors that lead it to be misunderstood.

You see, AR has an amazing novelty value, and people couldn’t wait but to use it just for the sake of using it and looking “cool”.

So, the first contact the mainstream had with AR was meaningless and often just a quick and innefective gimmick.

This lead the investors and business owners of the public develop a certain degree of skepticism, which led to the apreehensiveness some look upon Augmented Reality with.

The Adoptability of Augmented Reality: Too Niche for Mainstream Adoption

Augmented Reality needs technological devices to work with, and these technology devices aren’t mainstream yet – if you take smartphones out of the equation, which is fair since the most ellaborate and effective uses of AR still don’t work via Smartphone (unless we’re talking about some forms of retail).

The most ellaborate and therefore most usefull and groundbreaking AR developments still need some satelite hardware which isn’t yet mainstream.

On the other hand, when AR leaves the pioneers-only niche, its applications will become globally useful and transversally used, which will make this variable a thing of the past, and we’re quickly getting there.

How Security Concerns Hampered Augmented Reality: Lack of Cryptography Support

Lacking enough security to tame the beast was also one of the variables involved in creating a certain degree of skepticism towards AR.

AR usually works digitally and creating new connections either to the Internet or Intranet.

This creates additional vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers, which can be countered by cryptographic security measures.

However, cryptography for AR is evolving with a bit of delay, which is understandable.

Although there are plenty of solutions in the present, the past had many vulnerabilities open with no way to protect them, which made the rumor appear that AR had some serious risks for companies whose Intranet was conencted to important stuff or whose connection to the Internet could be exploited.

Privacy Concerns on Augmented Reality: The Risk of Corporal Abuse

Finally, privacy concerns were also a thing due in part to the previous factor but also by the fact the security breaches could affect consumer / user rather than the company behind the connection.

Personal data could be stolen and people could have their experiences invade their digital privacy, which made the initial concerns over advertising and whether it was ethic to have ads appear in front of consumer’s eyes through AR or not come into play.

Corporations could also be abusing the connection much like internet platforms are doing, and use the users as a source of data to sell to big data companies.

No one wants their privacy being used as a trade token, and as such AR gained a bit of a bad rep.

The Inexistance of Proper Digital Marketing Strategies and the Lack of AR Use Cases:

All in all, the entirety of these reasons together led to the fact there weren’t many use cases of AR that were more than gimmicks for a time, and that time in which AR was still an embryo of what it is today was a time in which nobody developed proper digital marketing strategies to complement the technology’s use.

The lack of proper planning and successful examples led that companies throughout the world only had the gimmicks to copy, and as such these gimmicks were the projects given the most exposition and made mainstream, which affected how the technology as a whole was perceived.

Fortunately though, AR has gone a long way and became something really groundbreaking as you can see in some apps that had real planning behind them.

Even 1 person indie development studios are doing amazing stuff as of now, and you shouldn’t let the misunderstood identity of AR stand in the way to adopting those.

We hope you now know more about the reasons which lead the Augmented Reality concept to be misundestood by many, and that if you were one of these people suspicious of AR you now feel comfortable enough to give it another shot.