Right now we have a disconnect between the physical and the digital. Think about bridging both seamlessly together
MIT Media Lab 

The internet evolves from 2D computer screens into a 3D internet that overlays the real world, an entirely new paradigm for navigating, identifying, and organizing data will be required
Michael Park

But you might one soon day ask yourself how you managed to live without that feature.

Augmented Reality is a new approach to digital storytelling that we are exploring. It is a new pathway that can lead away from the abstract depiction of objects and toward a more visceral sense of real-life scale and physicality.

This is how the New York Times is embracing AR in 2018. They started with a retro vending machine that you could place in your living room or somewhere else – augmented on your smartphone screen. Followed by Four of the Best Olympians, as You’ve Never Seen Them, David Bowie in Three Dimensions and they let you Explore InSight, NASA’s Latest Mission to Mars. Here is a list with a bunch of other recent #ARjournalism examples.

Are these recent examples any good? Do they justify costs and time needed to develop them? Time that could better be spent doing „proper journalism“? Besides all infatuation with technology these are crucial questions. And it definitely depends what kind of lenses (as in perspective) you wear when evaluating these experiments.

We can – first if all – assess that smartphone screens are not perfectly suited for proper AR experiences most of the time. They are ubiquitous but they are too small, you have to hold them, they feel like a hurdle unless you re-design the user experience. Speaking in metaphors: For a window to the world the smartphone is very small, it might better be suited as a magnifying glass in the hand of an investigator.

Maybe and only maybe – because i do not know if this observation stands the test of time –  Ian Bogost is right with his article in the Atlantic: Why 'Stories' Took Over Your Smartphone. The format, made popular by Snapchat and Instagram, is the native genre of glass rectangles. 

Where does that leave AR? Until we have proper smartglasses we need to cope with smartphone AR. Here we can try out, fail and learn crucial design skills needed in the years to come. It was something totally different to design a responsive website, an app or a conversational user interface instead of a simple html-based website for a desktop pc 2002. And things will get way more complicated when it comes to spatial design. You can include multi sensory here if you want to multiply problems.

From an innovators perspective it is crucial to tap into the cold water. You only learn when you do stuff and mostly when you do mistakes. So, well done NYT.

From a user perspective things are a bit more complicated. Because users only ask: Why should I care? The novelty factor quickly vanishes.

There is a lot AR can offer. Says Hisham Bedri, MIT Research Engineer. He held a short talk at this years AR in Action called Spatial news and AR journalism production where he listed spatial, perspective, interactive and social as fields of possibilities. While Erica Anderson from the Google News Lab named engagement, context and location as cornerstones of good AR in a SXSW2018 session on AR for newsrooms. 

A lot of well known buzzwords. But what do they really mean? And do they help you with developing a worthwhile experience? Going back to the one and only question asked by your audience: Why the heck should I care?

If you care about the users needs you will design better stuff, including AR experiences in the context of journalism. Engagement and social sound great but need to be fueled by actual people engaging and being social. And you can not force users to do that.

As long as our most fundamental needs are somewhat satisfied - that means we have enough air, food, water, sex and sleep - and we are save and have a somewhat social life then we can care about our social status and prestige. This is a strong driver for motivation. And might be a strong reason why to open up an AR experience. To help you get better and increase status. Especially in comparison with fellow human beings. Sounds corny? Well, just having fun together is a strong driver as well.

So let us check a couple of possible or already accomplished projects in order to ask if they enhance and/or enrich or what it would take to do so. I will break it down in a bunch of typical news sections.

ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ

If you have watched sports on TV during the last couple of years you are pretty much aware of augmentation of information. Whether it is soccer, baseball, rowing, skiing or whatever - you get context sensitive info-overlays these days. That is because sports is all about numbers, distances, speed, angles, lines, trajectories. It is only fun to nerd around if you get into the details.

This is why I totally agree that Augmented Reality Is The Next Big Move For The Sports Industry and hell yeah sports journalism is a part of it. You can learn how to perfectly play golf using a mixed reality headset or if you prefer soccer, here is your AR soccer trainer (Learn to Play Like The Pros with This AR Soccer Trainer) – that might give you an idea about the potential.

The current #1app for live baseball in the app store – that by offers premium features for a yearly fee of $19.99 – includes „Live pitch tracking with hi-res ballpark renderings". I am pretty convinced that the combination of sports, data and AR are huge.

In the next phase of technology’s evolution, AI will increasingly be “the brain” with which we process the world around us, while AR will be “the eyes” through which we visually and physically engage the augmented reality of our urban environment

Michael Park

Of all places it was Hamburgs Elbphilharmonie that was used for an interesting AR use case by the Washington Post last may: Using your phone’s camera, we’ll project the Elbphilharmonie’s unique acoustic panels on your own ceiling, explaining how the acoustic panels create a sound so clear and precise.

How great this must feel on future smart glasses with a crystal clear surround sound. Just start to imagine what is possible if we integrate 6 degrees of freedom and you could wander around in your living room transforming to a dreamlike landscape that changes according to the music being played. Yeah sure, sounds a bit far off. But I am in it for the long run.

I personally liked augmenting my kitchen with a David Bowie costume and I am pretty sure that we get used to augmenting digitized 3D models of everything. There are already 1,5 Million users of Sketchfab "the world's largest platform to publish, share, and discover 3D content on web, mobile, AR, and VR.“ Strong partners like Facebook (Facebook and Sketchfab partner to bring free 3D models to AR Studio) will help spread the word.  In January 2017 over 500 cultural institutions had joined Sketchfab and you should check out the cultural heritage section. But only models do not make a promising AR app. We need story, context and interaction to provide a sustained experience.

The whole topic of time travel is very much suited to accomplish that. In 2014 the Guardian augmented historical photos from the second world war on Google Street View imagery. That is a promising way that could and should be re-created with 3d animations or life-like 360 video footage. Our grandchildren will hopefully have access to good enough material from early 21st century. And I am pretty sure that you will have way more and way more immersive experiences about the Berlin Wall than today. But wait, there actually is one called MauAR.

That is a very nice idea. In theory. In practice the app again and again and again told me that „We´re having trouble recognizing your ceiling“. My fault. But I am just an ordinary DAU and a smartphone might be lightweight but if you keep holding it to the ceiling for a couple of minutes it feels like a brick.

The New York Times Mars experience is nice. The red planet just appeared in front of me. And while I started moving around the smartphone provided some neat tactical feedback to show me different infos. But: Where is the story? Where is the challenge? Where is the fun?

I think the combination of science + journalism + interactive / game elements + AR is promising instead. I can not dive deep into details here. But I am happy to discuss game elements in the context of journalism. For a start I recommend to play a science game for instance Rugged Rover by Preloaded for the British Science Museum in London.

Another promising area of science journalism in the context of AR is urban city planning. Just imagine to combine AR Minecraft and Education Minecraft. You could let users rebuilt certain parts of their city using Minecraft while storing their models in situ for others to see and discuss.

And just start thinking about food. There is a lot happening in that area from coke cans telling you about - well - coke to augmented burger menus. Where does (service) journalism come in here?  

To wrap things up just think about sensors and data for a second. Your smartphone can already measure noise levels with a decibel meter app. This data could be gathered, stored and presented as an interactive chart comparing aircraft noise in the city and -  of course - seamlessly integrated in an unobtrusive AR interface. And this is just one example. After having seen this piece of hardware i am pretty convinced that the add-on hardware market will totally go nuts.

It reminded me of an early iPad app I once tried. Nice but lacking the necessary elements to be engaging, fun or eye-opening for longer than a couple of seconds.

One of the most promising data visualizations in 3D when it comes to the stock market is from the Wall Street Journal: Viewers can project a holographic 3D view of the live U.S. stock market onto the real world, offering a groundbreaking way to see how the daily drama of the U.S. stock market is unfolding. Users can place the hologram on a table or floor, and explore the rising and falling sectors of the U.S. stock market with their camera.

Experience augmented reality in the WSJ app for iOS

An open source camera that employs object detection for data gathering