Part 1 Here! If you want to read that first.
When the iPhone came out and computing seemed to change overnight from big screens and clicky keys to sleek, undigestible candy bars, I was taken by surprise.
In 2007, I had already been using Mac computers for years and had even worked at the Apple Store during the meteoric rise in the iPod's popularity, but I still couldn't see a future where so many people would forget everything they knew about mouses and buttons. A future where it wasn't nerdy to go online in the middle of a party to post a quick thought or share a game with a friend.
Part of the reason I didn't expect the iPhone to clear the board on what mobile computing would look like was probably because I had just moved to Japan, where what you'd think of as flip-out "feature phones" that predated the smartphone were WAY ahead of what was available in most other countries. We had cameras, we had email, we had emojis. (Side note, Emoji is actually a word that originated with Japanese technology that means e(picture) moji(character), and isn't a portmanteau with "emotion" like its 90's internet cousin "emoticon").
We had some kinda' good games, and we could browse the web using these kinda' janky pages that were formatted especially for Japanese cellphones. There were a lot of "kinda's" with Japanese cellphones, but hey! It totally felt good enough.
Smartphones were able to leapfrog all of this in every other market, and all the nifty Japanese phone tech was stranded in a weird in-between land*.
Why did Apple's glass bar convince everyone to carry a tremendously powerful computer in their bag or pocket? The answers might feel kind of obvious now, but at the time, there were plenty of other attempts at unifying a phone with the web. Some, like the Blackberry, got their popularity in certain sectors. Why didn't these devices take over?
Why was it the iPhone that changed our ideas of what a phone is, or even what a computer is? What did I miss this at the time?
Part of the reason I wasn't fired up about the iPhone was because it wouldn't let me do anything new. I had GPS on my phone, I had an inexpensive iPod with tons of room for music, I was one of those people who even carried around a pretty decent digital camera which at the time, was worlds better than a phone.
In many ways, the iPhone sold because it didn't do anything new. Yet.
Look back at the first homescreen on the iPhone. It has Safari, it has Email, and a Camera. Even the music button is called "iPod." The short lived Apple-made YouTube app looks like a TV! And these buttons, the keyboard, are all rendered with a polished, tactile style that look like physical objects. Many of the apps had real-world design elements like stitching and paper texture. This design style, called skeumorphism, was widely panned in the tech world after a while. You'll notice it's gone now. This is what I call a transitional user interface (or transitional UI).
Transitional UI
The iPhone is a big departure from a flip phone with 12 buttons and certainly a mouse and keyboard. Apple got people to switch not by highlighting all of the ways it would change the future, but by making it as similar as possible to the computer stuff people were used to. Now accessible in a different way.
To be clear, I'm not saying that there wasn't tremendous innovation here - the iPhone was designed years in advance. The crew at Apple knew well ahead of time about many of the features and huge advances in technology that were coming from this nascent starting point.
But they didn't lead with that - their job was to get people to change to this new way of interacting, and they did it with gradual changes using familiar elements before opening the floodgates of potential.
Less than a year before all this, the next generation of game consoles had just been released. Sony and Microsoft were doubling-down on fancy, fancy graphics with the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 to tackle the AAA game market that they built over the past 6 years.
Nintendo, a company whose first major home device in Japan was called the "Family Computer," decided to try something that might get a new audience of people interested in trying video games instead.
The "Wii" didn't have fancy new graphics. It had a remote control.
Picture someone who has never really played videogames looking at an XBox 360 controller. It's got 2 joysticks, a four way d-pad, and whopping 11 buttons.
Compare that to Nintendo's "Wiimote," that you use by just moving and pointing.
This is the only game console my parents - who grew up in the 50's and 60's - ever bought for themselves to play. And the initial software offering was just as easy to grasp. No one needed a new bowling or tennis game, but Nintendo's "Wii Sports" built a familiar ramp from never having touched a controller to playing, competing with other players. One could argue that they're not even different enough to be better than the real thing, but I'm not sure that was ever the point. This is a transitional UI into video games.
The way we use physical metaphors for things in computers like "files," "folders," and "windows," aren't baked into digital technology. I was a little shocked when I realized that a computer doesn't actually need to call anything a folder or a window, or to display icons in order to function. These are all design choices to make technology more familiar.
Not Better, the Same
AR has a chance to make a transitional UI. To take everything we know about computers and poof it into a hologram world. Nothing new, just... videos, websites, games and calls, all hovering intangibly in front of you, on a wall, table or floor. That's it.
And I think this is what it will take to make people switch over to a new way of computing.
The iPhone and the Wii are pretty recent evidence for this kind of sea-change, but maybe the best examples are the desktop computers that have been around since right before I was born. When the Macintosh dropped in 1984, it took everything about the office that people knew -- folders, documents, and spreadsheets -- and drew pictures of them on the screen. At the time, there were already text-only computer systems that you could argue were much more powerful than a Macintosh. But taking the familiar and moving it to a new space, the transitional UI, is what got consumers to see what they could do with this new technology.
Augmented Reality won't be as fast or as powerful as a desktop (or maybe even an iPad) right away, but it also has huge advantages right away. Big, bulky screens? They're gone! And when you put the headset on, you can have as many screens that are any size or shape you want, and you can put them anywhere. They can follow you around (if you want).
Conference calls? They're in 3d now, and you can keep them in view while you walk around.
Multiplayer games? Now they're just your table, where you can see all of your friends characters' and stories come to life right in front of you.
None of these applications are new. But that's the point. The first presentation for the iPhone was about taking three things we already had: Web Browsing, Music, and a Phone, rolling them into one, and taking them with you in a new way.
I think the move to AR will be this, only it will be: Communication (FaceTime/Zoom), Entertainment (games, videos), and maybe a third thing like Exploration or local info (though that might come later).
Other interesting stuff that could be expanded upon. Let me know if you want a Part 3
- Other reasons why AR will be the next thing (2b): What are these AR apps that will convince someone to switch? Me, I want to sculpt a digital hologram.
- Other reasons why AR will be the next thing (2c): Are people really going to want this? It doesn't matter, we're stuck in capitalism right now and companies have to make us buy new stuff.
- But there are good uses for AR! Yep, accessibility, medical training, surgery, probably a lot of infrastructure engineering and also maybe, if we're lucky, having less screen time instead of more.
- But also we don't actually need it. Besides the stuff above, AR isn't helping anyone - otherwise can we figure out how to stop producing a bunch of trash at the expense of celestial amounts of energy, please?
- At this point, our model of invention for computing is outdated. The internet is no longer an experiment. We should be able to slow down and choose what we want to make with it after examining its impacts, instead of a bunch of investment driven companies racing to decide what they think we should need.
This kind of thing slows down how technology can develop, and I think that's a very good thing. We already know we don't need a new iPhone every year, etc. - I want to play cards with my friends in augmented reality. Sure I do! But I'd rather everyone in the world had enough food.
*To the point that these phones (a few of which are still produced every year) are now called "Garakei" as a reference to their technology having evolved on a divergent, specialized path, similar to the ecological evolution that takes place in the "Galapagos" islands (Written as Garapagosu in Japanese). I really like words.
