From Phone to Reality

How Augmented Reality will shift the Internet from Screens to Reality

The internet partly became our reality. It does not really matter where you go or where you look: restaurants, cafés, nightclubs, concerts, business meetings, or classrooms. Everywhere you look you will see people with a smartphone in their hand.

Communicating with their friends or business partners. Recording videos, taking photos, streaming current events live on Facebook everything is possible with our phone today. The internet became addictive. Everyone is on it. Our friends and families, our work, everything is online. Even my mother who said in 2010 that she will never use a smartphone is now sending me emojis on a daily basis. The internet sucked everyone in.

Screens are the Gateway to the Internet

Right now screens are still the gateway to the internet and to our digital world. There is simply no other way to interact with it besides of screens, keyboards, mouses, and touch screens. While voice recognition becomes more and more popular it is still only capable of doing very limited things. This is also the reason why it looks so scary when you see all people staring at their phone while ignoring the real life. When will that change?

Augmented Reality brings the Internet to Life

The iPhone introduced the internet to handheld devices in a beautiful way. Smartphones ever since simplified our access to the internet. We don’t necessarily need a large PC or laptop anymore. With the introduction of the iPhone, the internet became accessible within our Levi’s pockets.

Now we are once again approaching a turning point in our digital history. Augmented reality will remove the constraint of requiring screens for accessing the internet.
Here is what augmented reality is capable of doing:
Instead of consuming the internet through a 2D screen, AR technology will place the internet right into our reality. Augmented reality will allow us to interact with the internet in our real three-dimensional reality. It augments basically our digital reality (the internet) over our real world.

Imagine you get a text from your best friend. Instead of an annoying notification tone and pulling out your phone to read it, the message will simply show up in reality. In your view angle, you will see, read, and respond to messages. You will be able to video call people without holding a phone or looking onto screens. This product demonstration of Magic Leap shows the future capabilities of AR technology in a great way:

As augmented reality devices improve, get lighter, smaller, and cheaper the internet will jump from screens to our reality. Everywhere you look you will be in a twin-world: the real world augmented with a digital world — the internet. This comes up with new possibilities and chances. And by the way: we will never stare down to small screens anymore.