10y XR Outlook Report (Introduction)

Why visual wearables will change everything, but not all at once.

Isn't it strange that most of our digital lives are viewed through a flat rectangle window, constrained by the size of our hands and the limits of our pockets?

Everything that we do online is shuffled and arranged to fit within this rectangle. And we’ve become very good at doing just that. The better part of the past 2 decades was spent maximising what we can fit into it and how we can best interact with it; tapping and swiping its surface. It’s not just that one rectangle that guides our lives, either. Our lounge rooms are designed around another larger one that we sit in front of for a dose of information and entertainment each day. All of our chairs face it. All of our furniture is there to support it. Our offices are planned around our need to have different flat rectangles permanently perched in front of us, too.

These rectangles allow us to view & create & communicate. Together, we spend more of our lives in front of these 3 types of rectangles than we do in our beds asleep. So what would happen if all the stuff we usually see within those rectangles was suddenly able to break out of them?

It’s bewildering to imagine, so lets start small..

If you could instantly create a screen of any size, in any location for free, how would that change the layout of your house? What about the layout of your workplace? Now imagine some of those screens could subtly follow you around, hovering into view just when needed. What would you want them to show you? And at what times? Okay, now let’s take a closer look at what’s on all of those flat screens; everything you see, watch, read and create online. Would it still look the same if it could be anywhere, at any size, in the spaces around you?

Over the next decade, visual wearable devices have the ability to remove all of these rectangles from our lives and completely redefine our relationship with the digital world. In a vacuum, these devices would change everything we know about creating and consuming content. But the world is not a vacuum, and so we know from experience that we will actually see a more gradual transition from the old to the new.

At the start, we’ll just see our familiar rectangles of content transported to this new space for early adopters. Having said that, with a few years of mobile AR development under our belts, there will be some native spatial content ready to go alongside it. Over time, we’ll start tinkering at the edges more and more, experimenting with the new abilities we’ve just been handed.

As a broadcaster & publisher constantly evaluating how best to reach all Australians, the ABC will have to adapt its content and systems suit this new category of mobile device, along with the new habits and preferences it inspires. The ‘mobile disruption’ of the past decade showed a small glimpse at how big those changes might be — but keep in mind — that was just a shift from one rectangle to a smaller one you could touch and take with you.

This guide aims to outline what changes we can expect from the forthcoming second major wave of mobile computing and what the ABC can do to make sure it’s ready.