Five Overlooked Uses for Smartphones - Digital Explorers' Diary #53

Welcome to the Digital Explorers' Diary #53!

A curated collection of thought-provoking topics about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.

Executive summary:

• Five usages of smartphones you didn’t think about,
• First feedback on the Apple Vision Pro,
• Meta’s Horizon Metaverse is coming to Mobile,
• Open AI bought a game studio. signal or noise?
• And Meta’s next glasses will include live streaming.

Interactive Experiences: Five usages of smartphones you didn’t think about!

When thinking about digital experience design, we often forget that all users have a ready-to-use portal to the digital world right in their pockets.

The smartphone is our perfect asset. It's personal: everyone has one, and there is no friction to get it out of the bag and use it; actually, even quite the opposite. It's connected: most devices have 4G/5G, and many places have free WiFi. It's a social gateway to word-of-mouth, with direct access to social networks. It's powerful, with increasing computing power and comfortable screen sizes. It's a financial extension with touch payments and digital loyalty cards.

Let's dive into a few ideas on how to leverage these versatile devices:

• Companion apps.
  Whether it's for a popup store or an event, companion apps and websites are an efficient way to provide additional value for both attendees and the brand.
  Pre-event, the app can serve as a booking tool to skip lines, get access to a guest-only event, and plan the visit.
  During the event itself, it becomes a two-way communication channel. Through beacons or QR Codes, the attendees can be directed to additional content or exclusive experiences. In reverse, the phone can act as a remote control to interact with the space, for example, by activating a unique animation or publishing a message on a social wall.
  And post-event, the brand can keep in touch with the prospects with notifications, exclusive content, coupon codes, or rewards.
  At each stage, the attendees who have the app can access gifts, rewards, or coupons only available through that channel.
• Street marketing. Over the past year, “3D” video screens have been all over the cities, and AR experiences can be enjoyed over printed billboards. So much more can be done, though. From a simple coupon given to the ones who trigger the AR to a complete digital scavenger hunt through the city as a drive-to-store, brands can even combine and leverage tourism with digital marketing and brand awareness!
• Boutique. In many countries, it’s almost a standard for large supermarkets to have a drive app, where clients can create their shopping list and get it to the store a couple of hours later. Imagine how that could be applied to fashion and luxury. Obviously, the “take out” step is not a match here, but each user could prepare their visit on their smartphone, select the items they want to see or try on, and book a visit directly from the app. With retail being in need of a revival after COVID, a personalized visit that includes a fitting with a brand specialist is a perfect experience.
• Live concerts. In most concerts nowadays, a large percentage of the crowd has their phone up to record the show. Imagine if they had all a special app or website loaded on their phone, and the content of their screen would be synchronized to the music over the internet; how beautiful could that be? The crowd could become a canvas for additional lights and videos.
• Culture, Art, Museum, and Location-based entertainment. With the technology progressing and the devices becoming more and more affordable, many cultural and entertainment places now have Virtual or Mixed Reality experiences. In many cases, some people look at other users doing the experience or a queue of people waiting to participate. In such a situation, using the mobile phone allows the experience to extend to spectators. For a VR gaming experience, they could be active participants in the game, assisting or acting against the players. In a museum, they could get additional information about what the current visitors are looking at… The possibilities are endless.

Looking into the future, my prediction is that smartphones and XR headsets will merge at some point, with maybe a hybrid device that can be converted between smartphone and headset. That will change the game. In the meantime, contact me to dive deeper and brainstorm about applying this to your business!

This Week's News:

1. A few users are starting to get their hands on the Apple Vision Pro. Here is a summary of the different articles I’ve come across:
   Effortless onboarding,
   Fantastic quality on the pass-through,
   The back strap seems enough to handle the weight of the front part.
   The UI/UX is great; it feels like an iPadOS Heads-up display, which is both a compliment and a critique - Apple has chosen to focus on usability rather than pushing the capabilities, which makes sense given their strategy of evangelizing a novice public. Related: The native OS doesn’t seem to use tracking to anchor the windows on the environment. If true, this is disappointing. Custom apps will be able to use the tracking, though…
   Apple
2. Meta’s own Metaverse, Horizons, has just been released on Mobile to a few beta testers. They join VRChat, RecRoom, and Roblox in the race to get users.
   I think this is the correct move: a true Metaverse should be accessible from any device, not just VR headsets. Upload VR
3. Last week, Open AI bought a game studio that created an open-source clone of Minecraft. Signal or noise? It’s hard to say; it could just be that OpenAI's target was the team, led by ex-Instagram Thomas Dimson, and not the game itself.
   But could it be that OpenAI wants to enter the game world by creating models specifically designed to bring the game’s characters to life? Global Illumination
4. A leaked document shows that the next Meta Smart Glasses will include live-streaming built-in, with a camera and microphone. Is this the next generation of social media, where users will be able to follow influencers and see through their eyes? That’s a logic evolution though, it just makes live-streaming more discreet and easy… Or, to see the bright side, could this help in the industry for day-to-day work, training, support or maintenance?
   The old Meta Ray-Bans

From the Podcast

Every week, I’m teaming up with Guillaume Brincin and Sébastien Spas on the Lost In Immersion podcast. This week:

1. As hand tracking is getting better and better, we discuss its advantages and inconveniences versus using controllers. In summary:
   For experiences where precision is needed, controllers are still the device of choice. For example, high-speed games or training where precision is needed.
   For other experiences, hand tracking and gestures can be a great medium, assuming that the users don’t need to have their hands up in the air for too long.
   Meta
2. Seb then shared a very well-done example of clothes physics in VR. It still feels light, as if the fabric was silk, but it’s a significant improvement that will help virtual try-ons and more realistic clothes for virtual avatars in the Metaverse.
3. We then move to analyzing the upcoming release of the Lynx R1. It seems that getting funding for the manufacture was challenging; they even explained it in a blog post a couple of weeks ago. Since the podcast was recorded, Lynx posted an update on LinkedIn, mentioning they received the first batch. We hope they’ll manage to keep the pace on the subsequent batches!
   Lynx R1

Watch the podcast below, and tune in at 10 am UTC on Tuesdays on Twitch, and listen to the podcasts on Youtube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Amazon!

Did this newsletter spark some ideas? There are a lot of ways we can work together:

• A quick-fire, 30-minute brainstorm with me - book it here!
• We can ideate, prototype, and build your experiences - contact us here!