Augment Your Reality

The future is definitely “mobile,” and just not the way we currently think about it. That is, up until now we’ve tended to think about technology as something tied to, and dependent upon, hardware devices. Hence society has progressed from mainframe computers and servers to desktop computers to laptops to handheld and mobile devices to smartphones versus modern tablets. With cloud-computing for device independence, and technology progressions such as Google Glass, the technology we want exists beyond our platforms and begins to become “part of our being.” Google Glass allows us to see, through a device-enhanced pair of glasses, more information about the world around us. From combining personal activity data when engaged in sports with history data or statistics, such as with cycling or golf, to viewing recipes while cooking—we have the ability to view both the physical and online world simultaneously (and how is that for the future of search? For more see http://www.google.com/glass/start/what-it-does/).

Augmented reality continues to grow and adds another “layer” of mobile usage to our everyday practice, such as with Google Glass. Traditional virtual reality, however, seems to be stagnant in all areas except video games, as in MMOs. (Massive multiplayer online activities such as MMORPGs, or massive multiplayer online role-playing games—and image advertising options do exist within MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft; aw come on—check out WOW and let out your inner geek!)

Google Glass is an example of augmented reality, which gets buzz as it continues in development and we can expect it to rise in interest. The technical, visual identification of reality around us, and with the digital space, will grow in value. For example, on a more common and basic level, code scanning has become regular practice for many—retail store shoppers who use mobile devices to scan product bar codes and/or printed QR codes to obtain product detail or competitor costs and locations. Adding more data in combinations such as these or with Google Glass can have a lot of consumer value.

The Mobile Tomorrow

Is your smartphone just too big? We’ve seen the development of smartphone technologies for wrist watches. Similarly, our cars will soon all have layers of pertinent data to display on our windshields as part of our driving and navigation experience. And public touch-screen kiosks are nothing new, but when they can integrate our personal logins and full cloud identities, data, files, options, and the like—well, all this helps define what is the future of true “mobility”; we become one with the technology.

When we can visually “project” our desired usability interfaces and data access upon the tables and walls around us, this is true mobility. And graphic interface can be hardly necessary, thanks to voice-activated search and audio results. All these technologies exist now in some form or fashion and are easily accessible to us. Expecting an increase and blending of these technologies is only natural.

We’ve seen the power and growth of voice-activated technologies, such as with Apple’s Siri and Google Voice Search. And we should expect that technology and voice-activated search to grow. One of the characteristics of this is longer keyword strings in contrast to short-tail keywords. In spite of the complexity and inconsistent patterns of voice search instead of typed keywords, deeper, long-tail keyword phrases will be ripe for the SEO’s picking.

The search engines themselves are heavily vested in mobile technology overall. Google has its brand of Android mobile devices, and Microsoft Windows has its own mobile devices (remember that Microsoft MSN shares the technology behind Bing with Yahoo!). These efforts represent not only an interest in mobile, but digital share overall. That is, who will be the king of the digital world? Facebook has definitely been feeling this, especially with its mobile app not having all the functionality of its desktop website. Consequently, Facebook has bought up native mobile apps such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and has incorporated NFC technology, and even virtual reality, into its mobile deliverables.