When I was a kid, I would have never imagined that the future of computing would have been something like augmented reality. It just wasn't something that we were seeing in science fiction. Even as a professional in this career, seeing something like Minority Report was what I thought the future of computing would be. But now that we're here, it just seems so obvious. To me, it's amazing that Facebook is closing in on this stuff. It's just going to get people thinking in so many different new ways. AR Studio is incredibly easy to pick up. That's one of the amazing things about it. It allows anybody to use a simple authoring tool to develop the content. It's more of a tool like a 3D application than a coding environment.
When you're designing augmented reality experience, you want immersion from the user. You want the user to forget that he's looking through a camera, and you want him to feel like he's in the world. We want to move away from things that are overly explicit, like UI elements, to things that are almost invisible. Where it really becomes rich and random and full of neat surprises is when you make the user the focus. So really think about things that are natural to a user, moving their hands, looking at something, kind of baseline human ways of interacting with the world around them.
All of the techniques that we use in 3D animation, such as lighting, shading, reflectivity, all of those need to be used inside of augmented reality to give the elements the illusion that they are interacting with the real world. Augmented reality has become this medium for being able to tell stories completely different in new ways. Storytelling is what makes people feel like they're involved. Every company tries to make that experience enjoyable.
Trying on makeup, or hey, honey, how do these glasses look on me? People being able to share that with their friends and family is a game changer. The first time, you're not just at the receiving end of a brand's message. You are now part of the brand's message. Over the years, we've been using technology more and more to help us with our creative endeavors. AR is the next generation of what we're doing with arts and technology.
