Digital Urbanism - by Jeff Fong - Urban Proxima
Once upon a time, I worked on software products for local commerce. 1 Our platform cataloged merchant inventories, let consumers send orders from their phones to point-of-sale systems, and coordinated the work of delivery folks ferrying goods from A to B.
Software-enabled platforms have changed the way cities work. But the changes smartphone-enabled apps have brought to cities pale in comparison to what wearables and augmented reality (AR) based products will enable next.
Wearables bring the internet off of screens and into our ears and eyes. They put a product layer between us and the environment; the next generation of these devices will do this to a greater degree than we’ve ever seen before. As this happens, it will impact the way we use, interact with, and relate to the physical world around us — and in the process, change a thousand things about urban life.
Wearables are not a new concept. For those of us of a certain age, we can remember Google Glass as the first big – though ultimately failed – attempt at an AR wearable. Later products like Apple’s AirPods have put some functionality in our ears, but the dream of a personalized heads-up display (or just anything beyond the smartphone) has remained elusive. That, of course, is rapidly changing.
