One of the questions that I have entertained in the past year has been what comes after mobile. Not that everyone is getting in deep with mobile, but because some feel they have missed the boat and want to make sure that for the next thing, they are ahead of the curve. Well, I will give you one hint as to what will come next:

AR (Augmented Reality)

Those people who study media and communications have determined that there are 7 iterations of mass media communications which has occurred already in the course of human history. The 7th of these is mobile, the 8th was discovered not too long ago, and Tomi Ahonen describes it nicely.

AR is something that is coming. You can be forgiven in part for holding off on it before looking at getting into it with products such as Layar, Vuforia, and Aurasma. Or, you could be on the list for Google’s Project Glass, just waiting for it to get into your hands before you figure out what exactly it is that you can do with it in order to point people to some aspect of the Gospel that you expressly engage this world.

But, if you wait until it gets here, how do you react to a situation such as the one proposed in the concept video Sight. If social situations could be attended to like a game, or intuition and social savvy reduced to how much someone is willing to share or dig up from a database, or that life’s art and decoration are nothing more than something in our singular eyes alone… could you stand to wait until it gets here before you begin addressing the core components of its implications?

I wonder what an AR-enabled Mobile Ministry Video will look like… or rather, will I just go create it and see what happens.