The Horizon Report seeks to understand and forecast
technologies coming to fruition in the next five years (Johnson,
2011). Of these technologies, one I see
as promising is Augmented Reality (AR).
The basic concept of AR is to overlay the world around us
with a computer generated layer giving additional information. The technology is broken down into 2 basic
categories, visual metaphors and position based.
An example the visual metaphor can be seen with one of the
many sky applications on the iPhone. By
holding your phone up to the nighttime sky, the stars are sampled and named on
the phone. The program knows the star’s
layout/relative positions and with a little math, the ratios of distances
between the stars can be calculated giving the location in the sky. Through a visual metaphor, information can be
obtained from a background software based service to enhance what is being
observed.
A position based system we are all used to is the GPS
mapping used for navigation. We see the
same streets we are driving on in a computer screen that is intelligent enough
to tell us where to go. A newer
technology developed by Microsoft, the Kinect, allows the user to perform
gestures to play a game. Having a sword
fight in this environment is much more realistic than using a simple controller—although
it does get tiring a lot faster.
Augmented Reality has been in use and will continue to
evolve making our world and the virtual overlay interlaced through technology
to such a degree that we will come to take it for granted, much like many of us
do with the internet today.
References
Johnson, L., Smith, R., Willis, H., Levine, A., and Haywood, K., (2011). The 2011 Horizon Report.
Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.
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