Augment me baby, one more time
2009-08-14 10:48
Remember back in the '90s when virtual reality (VR) was all the rage? The promise was of fully fledged parallel worlds - digital wonderlands where anything was possible.
Then Hollywood came along and ruined everything with The Matrix. Our fuzzy, jerky VR systems were "real" enough to train pilots, but not to suspend our disbelief. And if we couldn't kung fu with Keanu Reeves in glorious Technicolor, then what was the point?
But a subtler, more sensible idea has emerged over the last decade - "augmented reality" (AR). Instead of trying to recreate reality in its entirety, AR works with reality to enhance it.
We already use the simplest form of AR in televised sport. Think of those lines that show you whether someone was offside during a rugby match, or the way commentators can scribble on the screen during a cricket match to illustrate a point.
So AR is essentially layering useful info on top of our view of life - giving us context and details that we might otherwise miss. It's a simple idea but it has exciting possibilities.
The barrier to widespread use of AR has long been that computers weren't portable enough to make it practical. But the new generation of "smart" phones (like Apple's iPhone and Google's G1) are essentially small computers that you carry around all day long.
Combined with a global positioning system (GPS), a digital compass (or magnetometer), and an accelerometer (a gizmo that can tell when and how fast a phone is moving), these phones now "know" where they are and what they are being pointed at.
This has already produced some incredibly clever applications, many of them centred around tourism. Last year a company called Wikitude launched an application for that G1 that gave contextual information about whatever it was pointed at. You can see it demonstrated here.
Since then the rush has been on to do new and exciting things with AR and smart phones. In June 2009 Layar, the world's first AR browser, launched to some acclaim. It uses information gleaned from the web to help you find things like the nearest ATM or club. And they plan to add everything from property info to restaurant listings.
But this is literally just the start of a revolution that will change the way we interact with the world.
Imagine a pair of glasses that highlights the groceries you're looking for on the shelves, leads you on the best route around the hypermarket and gives you the nutritional info on any product you look at.
Imagine a heads-up display for policemen that instantly scans number plates and faces and warns them of stolen cars, kidnapped children and escaped convicts.
Imagine diagnostic goggles that help a mechanic repair your car by picking up details that he might otherwise miss.
Or a visor for surgeons that measures vital signs and highlights the organ being operated on.
These are possible already, they are just too expensive to implement on a wide scale. But as we all know technology has a habit of getting cheap very quickly.
- Alistair is Social Media Manager at 20FourLabs.
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