Augmented reality could lead to a dystopian world where everyone is trapped by their own views. It's up to architects to set them free, argues Owen Hopkins in his first Opinion column for Dezeen.

Walking down a street in central London, I stare down at my smartphone screen. Only a few more metres to go. I quicken my pace, facedown in my phone, oblivious to the world passing around me. I reach a small intersection. Where is it" It should be here. Then I see it. It's small, about the size of a dog, but yellow and with a strange zig-zag tail. It looks at me expectantly. At last, I've caught my first Pikachu.
My pursuit of this cartoon-like fictional creature will be familiar to any one of the millions of people who have played Pokémon Go, which took the world by storm last year. Part of the game's popularity clearly stemmed from the nostalgia around its 1990s Gameboy forebears. Yet its seductive merging of the digital world of Pokémon with external reality showed the potential of a 21st-century technology set to fundamentally transform the ways in which we interact with the world: augmented reality, or AR.
AR's current dependency on smartphone screens is diminishing, and quickly
At the moment users have to consciously switch into the AR of Pokémon Go, which only comes into being on a smartphone screen. However AR's current dependency on smartphone screens (at least in its mainstream applications) is diminishing, and quickly. Even after the market failure of Google...