Augmented Reality
Out of context: Reply #12
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- detritus0
Sorry, I'm a bit of a dick sometimes - I just thought you were clumsily trying to get out of doing your own thinking on't subject.
AR, in my belief, is THE future of computer interfaces - but quite in what form, who knows?
The problem we face at the moment is the social parity and constancy of the interface in its interaction with visual perception - ie. what mode will the AR take systematically, and how will that evolve?
Right now, we can take a 2D panel (phone, touchpad, etc) hooked up to GPS, a camera and smart tracking, and have it overlay data augmentatively. That's fine and indeed, pretty damn cool - but it's fairly basic. We're still prodding around, trying to work out what it's good for - hence all of the gimmickry. Samesame every time a new tech emerges.
Fast forward 15 - 25 (50 - 100..) years and we should have advancements in 'ocular displays' - either embedded at the back of the retina (as seen in current attempts to restore site to certain classes of the blind) or in-contact lens (don't have the link to hand, but 'someone' (MIT? israeli Uni or something?) recently demonstrated EM-powered (as with RFID) small matrix structures that could emit light within a contact lens).
Couple this kind of tech with the likely hyper-networked and hyper-embedded future we're already knee-deep in and we can envisage the emergence of 'consensus virtual realities' either in totality (as in total immersion - shut your eyes or turn off the lights and immerse yourself entirely in VR) or merely augmentatively.
Given that there's a huge interest in 3D, both in terms of glasses at the movies or in fast RPM rotating 'displays', it easy to imagine professional/military implants in the not-too distant future, and then at a consumer level thereafter. At the very least, we'll have clunky 'glasses' that can do this in the next 5-10 years, latest.
See - unless we can come up with some cheap, easy, portable, safe way of creating voluminous 3d displays made up of pixels (voxels?) of air being plasmafied into myriad forms of coloured dots, we'll never have 3d displays like envisaged when R2-D2 projected Princess Leia ( - or, more recently where Robert Downey Jnr. or Tom Cruise interact with free-floating visual displays in Iron Man or Minority Report).
We could, however, cheat and interact with a 'consensus virtual reality', as rendered in the cloud, then projected seperately, to each individual.
Luke and ObeWan both see Leia's projection, as if she were tiny and standing on the table, but a third party viewer lacking the AR tech would just see them gaping stupidly at free space, talking about something that isn't even there.