Despite limitations, publishers plot more augmented reality for 2019
Ray Soto, the director of emerging technology at USA Today, has big plans when it comes to augmented reality.
Last year, Soto, along with three colleagues in the emerging technology department and a rotating cast of reporters and designers, created four AR projects, including “3, 2, 1 Launch,” a standalone app focused on spacecraft, and a separate AR experience designed to promote a new podcast, “The City.”
But more importantly, Soto’s team also spent its time laying a foundation internally so that any of the news publisher’s dozens of titles can create an AR project in an effort to help USA Today expand the kinds of AR content it can produce.
Years after AR and VR captured headlines in the industry, it’s finally starting to look like publishers are figuring out what format they’re going to bet on — and how it’s going to work.
It’s also benefited from the fact that augmented reality experiences require fewer resources to produce: A single person can whip up a simple augmented reality experience in the space of a few weeks, according to Dan Pacheco, the Peter A. Horvitz chair of innovation at the Newhouse School of Syracuse University. This past year, The New York Times’ AR team managed to produce an augmented reality component for a story about Syria in less than a week.
But more than anything, the thing holding AR back the most is the devices that people experience it through. “The phone is not naturally an AR device,” Roberts said. “I don’t think that in the version we have now, [AR]’s going to be mainstream,” he added. “But it’s evolving so quickly.”
Instead of phones, Roberts said, what augmented reality needs is for a device like the Magic Leap to take root as a mass consumer technology....
“I really feel like consumers are vain enough that until it really gets down to a look like a pair of Warby Parkers, you’re not going to see mass consumer adoption,” Zenith’s Archer said.
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