Let’s pull Augmented Reality and climax with JISM

Oh come on! It's ripe for renaming

Are you talking to me?

At one point, he shows us a piece of AR in which a tiny video of a man stares at us through the aforementioned hole and appears to be talking to us while waving his hands around. After two whole minutes of this torture, I realise that we are probably supposed to be listening to what the video man is saying, rather than to an unpleasant hiss, and I pluck up the courage to inform the demonstrator that we can’t hear a fucking thing.

“Oh sorry, I forgot to reconnect the audio cable,” he apologises jovially. “That must have been the most boring thing ever!”

Thirty silent disco headphones tumble to the floor as we nod in unison.

When it comes to question time, a microphone is passed around the audience. We can hear each question very distinctly through our headphones. Unfortunately, the demonstrator can’t: his headset mic isn’t picking up our audio, so he borrows one of our headphones … but these don’t have a mic. In the end, he is forced to wear two headsets at the same time, like a Shoreditch hipster nightclub had accidentally hired a demented Steampunk Cyberman to DJ for the night.

None of this, however, compares with his chosen subject matter itself: Augmented Reality. He was asking for trouble, surely, by volunteering to talk about tech that is complete and utter bollocks. In a series of little demos, we got to see lots of glitchy examples of dire little graphics that pop up and promptly go weird or fall apart, while bearing all the convincing 3D realism of the set design in Wolfenstein.

"Augmented", I remind readers, means to be improved or made greater by having something added to it. How exactly does obscuring 3D reality with a wobbly stack of unconvincingly skinned primitives, only viewable through a limited two-dimensional flat screen and only controllable via two-dimensional gestures, count as an augmentation?

This bloke was right: "Augmented Reality" is not just a bad name, it’s a complete misnomer, and is ripe for renaming. However, he can stick "XXooming" up his arse, or should I say, allow it to "tumble down his hole", preferably with the flashlight to keep it in place.

I was thinking more along the lines of Obscured Reality, or perhaps Poorly Implemented Overlay Tech, or even Over-Complicated Flat Alternative to Showing You Legible Information by Getting in the Way of Actual Reality.

Let’s settle on Jittery Implementation of Shell Models. I look forward to ex-AR developers producing their JISM in front of audiences in future. Break out the screen-wipes. ®

Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. Other than on-screen entertainment, he fails to see any genuinely practical application for AR that cannot be adequately achieved with a simpler and cheaper alternative. AR does not make information convenient, either. On the contrary, AR is the most inconvenient user-facing 3D tech ever conceived.