The recent Augmented Reality Event brought ideas that have been bubbling away in the background of mobile and web development a bit more out into the open. Things seem to be getting interesting in the world of Augmented Reality. Science fiction author Bruce Sterling opened the event by describing Augmented Reality as being not at it’s dawn, but at it’s 9:00am and in need of a coffee.
http://www.vimeo.com/12351044It’s reminiscent of the interest in Virtual Reality technologies that took off a couple of decades ago.
1992 saw the publication of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash in which the physical world and the virtual world of the Metaverse affected each other. The same year that saw publication of Howard Rheingold’s “Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds – and How It Promises to Transform Society“.
VR reached very few people outside the lab. Medical students may have been operating on virtual patients before tackling the real thing, but for most people’s only experience was a one-off use of a bulky VR helmet to gaze out on jagged, jittery stereoscopic renderings of chequerboard floors and monochromatic skies.
The lab has been a busy place for the last couple of decades. The most recent Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, The Metaverse Assembled, presents peer-reviewed papers and advertises the Virtual Goods Forum in London. Does this intersection of the physical and the virtual have the potential to benefit us further ?
Augmented Reality, by which I’m thinking about overlaying digital information onto what your camera is showing you, is not new but hasn’t been accessible or applicable to most people so far. Head Up Displays have been the provinice of the combat helicopter pilot rather than the suburban utility vehicle driver.
One form of AR that people have been exposed to recently is the type pushed by marketers whereby a piece of software allows their products to be cleverly overlaid on a blocky symbol when viewed through your camera’s phone. This requires the user to download and print the symbol, then download, install and run the software, then activate the camera in your phone or other device, then enjoy the augmentation. It’s clever, but the only thing that can be augmented is a specific blocky symbol that has to be physically produced.
AR holds more potential if augments the world that we already have around us informatively. The blocky-symbol AR system nearly works but needs a few important adjustments. We need
- a device which knows where it is
- and what’s in front of it
- and what information to add to the picture
These glasses are the evolved descendents of the bulky VR helmets of the past and another sci-fi tie in : Willam Gibson’s novel Virtual Light had an artifact similar to these in the plot. Most people are going to use a mobile phone equipped with a camera and GPS because they already have one, maybe alongside products made by companies like Vuzix.
We have access to the personal hardware for AR. Making it location aware has been a bit hit and miss so far. Our devices know, most of the time, in most places, roughly where they are. Mobile GPS is generally quite useful, but prone to lose contact with the satellite constellation when you really need it, when you’re in the centre of a city and surrounded by skyscrapers. Traces from GPS devices always make it look like I’m jumping wildly about rather than walking or driving from A to B.
The next generation of GPS satellites are in orbit now so maybe the way that the device is located will improve. Like the first generation, these satellites are shared between military and civilian audiences.
The military look to be developing some interesting applications (here are concept sketches for the proposed iARM combat AR system) but, like previous incarnations of AR, these don’t seem that applicable to most people. Am I missing out by not seeing Main Street in infrared and ultraviolet ?
The final piece that makes all this relevant is the augmentation, the addition of relevant information to the location aware device that improves for the user the context of the geospatial and visual information. It’s really up to us to design this part.
Without military grade funding, ARDevCamp “believe AR must be fundamentally open, interoperable, extensible, and accessible to all, so that it can create the kinds of opportunities for expressiveness, communication, business and social good that we enjoy on the web and Internet today”. That sounds like a more useful approach to utilising the vast quantity of information that we can gather, sense and produce.
Dutch venture Layar are tying all the threads together in an accessible way with their reality browser for iPhone 3GS and Android phones. @AugmentedPlanet noticed that “Layar developers are making money by selling paid layers”, and information marketplaces like Infochimps will no doubt start to offer geotagged data for use by AR systems.
We might even consider augmenting our perception of the world around us rather than making do with a flat, rectangular version. Would 360 degree vision be useful ?
The main question is no longer whether reality can be augmented as sci-fi suggested but whether people want their reality to be augmented and if so in what way.
Which systems will people adopt and which will be ignored ?
