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Let’s pull Augmented Reality and climax with JISM

Oh come on! It's ripe for renaming

Something for the Weekend, Sir? “Augmented Reality is a terrible expression,” says the AR demonstrator. “It’s a pity it doesn’t have a better name. So we call it XXooming. With two Xs.”

Oh dear, I can tell this is about to be a presentation involving a string of brand-new made-up terms designed to mask the abject failure of the technology in question to have achieved anything remotely useful in the last 20 years. Half an hour of wordification and expressionalisationity awaits. Solutionise, baby. Bring it on.

“Now here’s the girl. She’s come to life.”

Impressive start: it seems AR can raise the dead.

“Try to find the bottom. Look down that hole. Use the flashlight.”

I have absolutely no intention of shining a torch down this zombie woman’s hole, thank you very much.

“As she falls, look, you can tumble inside right behind her.”

Er ... hang on, is he doing this on purpose?

Contrary to your expectations, I am not attending a virtual reality porn flick demo.

Rather, this is a public presentation of how a talented developer has added AR features into a children’s book. Now that you know this, hopefully the fnar-fnar has become an eww-yuk.

Basically, the demonstrator hadn’t prepared his lines. There are many creative industries in which you can wing it during a presentation, but IT isn’t one of them.

Your kit is certain to go wrong at some point and your company’s product is guaranteed to come across as a complete turkey, so a thoroughly rehearsed patter is essential.

IT demos are cursed. Indeed, any use of IT in public is destined to end up in very public humiliation for the user. Listen to talk radio on any given day and, sooner or later, you will hear newsreaders struggling with their own computers.

Back home in the comfort of their own bedrooms, radio professionals practice simultaneous reading, speaking and scrolling and it works every time.

But as soon as the red "On Air" lamp illuminates, all ten hells of buggeration break loose, as batteries mysteriously drain, screens go wonky and mice stop working – all of which becomes increasingly evident to the listener as the newsreaders' barely strained voices try to shout over ugly bleeps produced by a full keyboard buffer or the ringing of their own mobile phones.

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