*Well, yeah. The Augmented Reality metaphor is "magic," and in reality, magic doesn't exist. And is that a problem? Yeah, a whole bunch of 'em:
http://www.genebecker.com/2009/09/thinking-about-design-strategies-for-magic-lens-ar/
(...)
"Less-than-magical capabilities
"Compared to our expectations of magic lenses, today’s GPS+compass implementations of mobile AR have some significant limitations:
"* Inaccuracy of position, direction, elevation - The inaccuracy of today’s GPS and compass devices in real world settings, combined with positional errors in geo-annotated data, mean that there will generally be poor correspondence between augmented graphical features and physical features. This will be most evident indoors, under trees, and in urban settings where location signals are imprecise or unavailable. Another consequence of location and orientation errors is that immediately nearby geo-annotations are likely to be badly misplaced. With typical errors of 3-30 meters, the augments for the shop you are standing right in front of are likely to appear behind you or across the street.
"* Line of sight - Since we can’t see through walls and objects, and these AR systems don’t have a way to determine our line of sight, augmented features will often be overlaid on nearby obstructions instead of on the desired targets. For example, right now I’m looking at Yelp restaurant reviews floating in space over my bookshelf.
"* Lat/long is not how we experience the world - By definition, GPS+compass AR presents you with geo-annotated data, information tied to geographic coordinates. People don’t see the world in coordinate systems, though, so AR systems need to correlate coordinate systems to world semantics. The quality of our AR experience will depend on how well that translation is done, and today it is not done well at all. Points Of Interest (POIs) only provide the barest minimum of semantic knowledge about any given point in space.
"* Simplistic, non-standard data formats - POIs, the geo-annotated data that many of these apps display, are mostly very simple one-dimensional points of lat/long coordinates, plus a few bytes of metadata. Despite their simplicity there has been no real standardization of POI formats; so far, data providers and AR app developers are only giving lip service to open interoperability. Furthermore, they are not looking ahead to future capabilities that will require more sophisticated data representations.
"At the same time, there is a large community of GIS, mapping and Geoweb experts who have defined open formats such as GeoRSS, GeoJSON and KML that may be suitable for mobile AR use and standardization. I’ll have more to say about AR and the Geoweb in a future post. For now, I’ll just say that today’s mobile AR systems are starting to look like walled gardens and monocultures.
"* Public gesture & social ambiguity - Holding your device in front of you at eye level and staring at it gives many of the same social cues as taking a photograph. It feels like a public gesture, and people in your line of sight are likely to be unsure of your intent. Contrast this with the head down, cradled position most people adopt when using their phone in a private way for email, games and browsing the web.
"* Ergonomics - Holding your phone out in front of you at eye level is not a relaxed body position for extended viewing periods; nor is it a particularly good position for walking...."
