December 9th, 2007
Two great articles in this week’s Economist on augmented reality. The first notes that the some of the most exciting uses of the internet rely on coupling it with the real world. As it states,
“…Social networking allows people to stay in touch with their friends online, and plan social activities in the real world. The distinction between online and offline chatter ceases to matter. Or consider Google Earth, which puts satellite images of the whole world on your desktop and allows users to link online data with specific physical locations. The next step is to call up information about your surroundings using mobile devices—something that is starting to become possible. Beyond that, “augmented reality†technology blends virtual objects seamlessly into views of the real world, making it possible to compare real buildings with their virtual blueprints, or tag real-world locations with virtual messages.
All these approaches treat the internet as an overlay or an adjunct to the physical world, not a separate space. Rather than seeing the real and virtual realms as distinct and conflicting, in short, it makes sense to see them as complementary and connected. The resulting fusion is not what the Utopians or the critics foresaw, but it suits the rest of us just fine.”
As the second points out, augmented reality is becoming more common & useful in fields as diverse as medicine, training, design and entertainment. As the article notes, augmented reality is still an:
“…immature field compared with virtual reality, which has now entered the mainstream in the form of video games, online virtual worlds and computer-animated films and special effects. The additional technologies required to take virtual images and integrate them into the real world still have a long way to go: most AR technology is still expensive, fragile and unwieldy, though researchers are doing their best to change that. But given a few more years, it is not hard to imagine where all this might lead: imagine satellite-navigation systems that appear to paint the road yellow to show a driver which way to go, mirrors that let you try on different outfits or haircuts, or glasses that turn the whole world into a backdrop for a video game. Why settle for reality when you can augment it?”
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
