From psfk.com
"New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter was witness to a unique exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art last month. Organized by artists Mark Skwarek and Sander Veenhof, the exhibition made use of an augmented reality app called Layar to upload work that could only be seen via an iPhone.
While unsuspecting audience were appreciating the art galleries, Porter could see the Berlin Wall, a desert path and faces, all floating in air in front of him (video below)."
read more on psfk.com
Excerpt - read on the whole on:
http://www.secondtense.com/2010/09/scott-pilgrim-harbinger-augmented.html
"A Harbinger of Things To Come
I have many friends and colleagues working with augmented reality and social media and agree that it will continue to grow. But I think we will all be surprised at the scope at just how pervasive it will become. Because Augmented Reality is an extension of expressionism, it's more than just a new technological wonder. In fact, it's not a technological discovery, it's something implicitly embedded in human thinking, that technology has slowly been able to evolve to express in more complex and accessible ways.
Augmented Reality has been here with us forever, actually. Look at the definition of Augmented Reality - it is contextual information laid out on top of the "real" physical world. By this definition, we can look back to the dawn of civilization. Language is the most basic, ancient form of AR, where our words both express and sculpt the word. One might even agree that language makes possible all acts of civilization itself. And through history, all sorts of means of communication have been layered on top of our physical world to add reality.
So now we live in an age where we can manipulate reality by putting the physical world on a screen and adding images, text, sound, and video on top of it. In another 5 years, we'll have Heads Up Display glasses that will do the same thing; first they'll start as important tools for jobs, but like computers in the 90s, they'll spread from our jobs to our common life. Then in 10 years, we'll have contact lenses that do the same thing - in fact, they're already being tested in the earliest stages. Imagine the applications people will write for these! Data for almost anything, customization for how we view the world - I should do a blog post just listing the possibilities, but a few off the top of my head:
- Automatic facial recognition and linking to peoples' social network profiles.
- Scavenger Hunt games based on what you see - like "spot the VW beetle"
- Enhanced target acquisition for soldiers
- Jobs that have complex sets of parts will have them all labeled / highlighted, such as in surgery, auto mechanics, or watch repair.
- Construction supervisors seeing how pieces of building are supposed to be constructed and being able to compare to the actual work.
- Visual E-mail
Speaking of which - why haven't I read or seen any science fiction with this? If anyone knows of any, please post in the comments.
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--To an unenlightened observer, Ron Haidenger's demonstration of playing a video game by tilting a piece of cardboard back and forth looks more than a little bit nutty.
But to anyone wearing his company's computer-enhanced glasses, which seamlessly delete the image of the cardboard and replace it with a metal ball spinning through a gleaming three-dimensional maze, it's a near-hypnotic experience.
"The response no matter where we show it is phenomenal," says Haidenger, manager of Vuzix's consumer division. "There's a huge hunger in the market for AR hardware."
AR is, of course, short for "augmented reality." The concept isn't entirely new: it's crept into public consciousness in the last few years in the form of those virtual yellow line markers in broadcasts of football games and heads-up displays in some cars.
But a new crop of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists has more ambitious plans. They gathered here this week in the Santa Clara Convention Center for a conference that's not called one--the official title is the first Augmented Reality Event--to come up with concepts that will convince all but the most technophobic that they should be looking at the world through a new set of spectacles.....
cont.