Failure to Augment

Subscribe FAILWith the promotional anticipation of a summer blockbuster release and a six-figure budget, Esquire's Augmented Reality issue poised ready to pounce on the minds and hearts of the public at large. Sadly, also like a bloated budget flick, the "technology" showcase completely misses the point.

It started at the mailbox. On the cover of my shiny new AR enabled issue of Esquire, the subscription sticker came slapped right on top of the cover AR marker. Nice.

The sticker came off fairly easily and my wife and I fired up the Esquire AR app after downloading it from the Esquire.com AR page. The various AR enabled bits of the magazine essentially allow you to use the magazine as a controller for what could easily be web based bonus content. Not the point of AR. AR takes the real world and enhances it via a superimposed digital layer of information, multimedia and/or interactivity. Reality PLUS augmentation. Why is this so difficult to understand?

Now, the millions of people wooed by Esquire's marketing machine are all trying out the AR enabled bits of the magazine, trying desperately to look past the pages of the magazine to see the multimedia content wobble around onscreen and change if they twist the physical page right and left. That's not augmenting reality, that's really annoying. The question becomes, has Esquire done more damage to AR than good? Will AR still continue to capture people's imagination but fall short of its true potential? Or will such lame AR implimentations be a step on the AR path, slowly getting the public used to interacting with computers via cameras as input devices for whatever purpose, no matter how banal, redundant or simplistic.

Are attempts such as Esquire's the equivalent of vaudville-like performances passing for film content in that medium's early days? Or even the early web's attempt to replicate the print world or even TV. Only with the 2.0 version did the web really start to find it's own unique uses. Who will introduce the Twitter or Facebook of Augmented Reality? What's that sweet spot of wide appeal that truly brings the power of augmentation to bear?

Esquire has always provided the world with insightful, compelling and relevant content. They've taken a big step, experimenting with this new way of bringing that content to the world. Let's hope it isn't their last.