Augmented reality is a viable focus for a new model of worker empowerment. That’s one reason why it’s important to look at places where the model appears to have failed, even before the concept of AR in empowerment got started. Protocol gave us an opportunity to do that with an article on Daqri, a company who raised a big war chest and then fell from grace. How, and what might Daqri’s experience teach us about next-gen empowerment? Let’s see.
The Protocol tale of Daqri woe deals with a lot of business issues, and they’re surely valuable here. It seems clear that the big influx of dollars came along with a total buyout of Daqri, a situation that essentially gave all the founders of the startup an exit before they’d really even had an entry, market-wise. It also made the company totally reliant on the insights of the investors, which isn’t usually a good way to get a tech concept going.
I want to deal with the broader technology and focus issues in this blog. The business issues may well have contributed to the company’s going under, but could Daqri have been saved by a good business framework? Only if the technology was suitable.
Augmented reality, obviously, is about augmenting reality. That means mixing real-world viewpoints with something generated from data and applications. There seem to be three logical pieces to all AR. First, something that lets the data/applications know what the real-world context is. Second, something that frames the data/application information in that context, and finally, something that actually creates the display. The balance of importance of these three things can vary, but it sure seems like a measure of each is always necessary for AR to work.
Conceptually, Daqri was a surfer on the AR wave, starting with the idea of using QR codes on objects to superimpose something on a smartphone field of view when the code was scanned. The QR code itself is the first of my three AR requirements, the database of QR-code information the second, and the phone the third. The early target applications were very consumeristic, and it was quickly obvious to everyone that the market for consumer AR was still a long way off. The shift to a business focus was the result, and that’s when the bigger funding influx came.
Here’s a quick lesson in itself. How many times (most recently in my blog yesterday on AT&T) have we seen vendors shift from a broad-market target to a business-market target because the let the hype in the market lead them too far ahead of reality? Yes, it’s often easier to make a business case for something enterprise targeted, because an enterprise’s value propositions are purely financial. Consumers have more subjective benefit cases, always exciting because they’re always susceptible to hype. Just saying….
Moving back to Daqri, the logical thing to have done at this point was to look at the general model of an AR-based business case, encapsulated in my three points. Businesses want worker productivity and empowerment, so the best approach would have been to ask how AR might empower workers. This, I think, might have led to a top-down exploration of the notion of AR as a bridge between the physical world in which the worker and the work coexists, and the information world that IT systems, applications, and data could create.
Instead, what Daqri really did was focus on the device that created the AR experience, the last of my three requirements for AR. Their M&A, fueled by that windfall funding, focused on building the AR experience, too. There was little or no effort expended on the architecture of the two-different-worlds model of worker empowerment via AR. This architecture, you may recall, has been the subject of a number of my “information fields” blogs. Without an architectural model, focusing on the AR device was like focusing on a killer billboard beer ad without having any beer to sell.
What they came up with was an AR helmet, a device that would surely have been a wonderful platform but for the fact that it was going to cost well over ten thousand dollars per unit. This, at a time when businesses were going for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) to avoid buying workers smartphones. The helmet would require a monumental business case to justify, and there was still no real application framework to exploit it. The later decision to focus on glasses rather than helmets didn’t help as much as hoped; even the glasses cost more than three iPhones. So, to make a long story short, down they went.
Protocol here gives a nice summation: “But ultimately, the demise also has a lot to do with factors that aren’t all that unique to Daqri: Making hardware is difficult, as is inventing products for a use case nobody yet wants.” But that kind of understates the problem; there was no use case to invent the product for. A productivity tool, more perhaps than any other kind of tool, is contextual. It has to fit into the world of worker and work, and at the same time into the information and empowerment world. That’s not a job for a display, it’s a job for a kind of software application that we can glimpse today but which we can’t just go out and buy.
The other point is that Daqri’s approach could never generate a “use case”, only a framework in which use cases could be developed. Most of the architectural heavy lifting of a two-worlds productivity enhancement framework using AR would have been generally useful. A little specialized tweaking could then have presented a prospect with a real use case, with modest effort. If somebody gave me three hundred million, I’d sure believe I could generate that productivity enhancement framework. I’m equally sure thousands of others could do it too.
Did Daqri miss the mark because the state of the art, at the critical time in 2013 when they tried to shift their focus, was simply not advanced far enough? Kubernetes’ initial release was the following year, and the concept of a Kubernetes ecosystem, cloud-native, service mesh, and all the other good DNA, was still in the future. Did they miss it because they never saw it, instead thinking the realization of AR was the device that displayed it? Did they just get caught up in promoting the concept to get a profitable flip, and never quite got to the realization? We’ll probably never know, but that’s not the question we need to answer.
The real question? Will others repeat the failure, for the same reason(s) or new ones of their own invention? It’s not that doing the right thing in AR is “difficult” in a technical sense, but it may well be difficult in a business sense. Who will fund a startup well enough to take that productivity enhancement framework concept and run with it? Who will design it? Who will wait, through the development and prototyping, to buy it? I think you could get the answer for three hundred million, but could you productize it successfully for that? A harder question.
Remember the old song “Born too Late?” Daqri may have been born too early, and we may still be too early. Open-source software is advancing, and with the advance (and with some false starts and disorder) it’s inventing the things that are needed, because it’s need that drives it. Maybe as soon as this year, or maybe several years down the line, the critical pieces will emerge, and that will cut the cost and risk of developing the framework Daqri needed, but never had.