Who’d say? It seems that 2019 is turning out to be the year when publishers start thinking seriously about Augmented Reality—-and not so much about its more popular cousin, Virtual Reality.
Don’t know how this shift has taken place, but I knew that this was so when the great Joe Zeff visited my Columbia class earlier this semester and did some handy and fun demos of AR for my students. They were as mesmerized as I was. Joe did his tricks and showed that AR is very much part of the now for publishing—and for advertisers.
Now a piece recently published shouts just that in the headline: VR hype has been replaced by AR hype among publishers
Why has VR cooled a bit?
Let’s be clear, it is not that VR is out completely. We still continue to see some interesting storytelling via VR in The Guardian , one of the first newspapers to start experimenting with the emerging technology. The New York Times launched its own VR mobile app in 2015, and there are some good examples to be seen there as well.
Yet, VR requires more from the users than does AR. Augmented reality has become available to anybody with a smartphone, while VR remains niche and requires headsets, which are still quite pricey for many users.
What’s more important, users, especially millennials, like the added experience that AR can provide for visual storytelling. Here we will have the ability to take the user almost anywhere and place him there.
It is key to understand the difference: Virtual Reality (VR) takes you to places. Augmented Reality (AR) brings places to you!
So, it will be more AR and better and more frequent use of audio that we will see the rest of 2019.
Publishers who are visionary are already making sure that these two storytelling strategies become part of the daily menu in their newsrooms.
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An interview of interest
http://www.itertranslations.com/blog/2019/3/11/fd60ybflpvlqrgrpdp5ida5rq0c3sp
TheMarioBlog post #3030