Augmented Reality is coming…

Eric W. Shamlin • 22nd Dec 2009 • Random Thoughts, Advertising, Random Thoughts, Random Thoughts, Science & Technology

By that I mean AR is nearly here in useful, fun and potentially productive ways… soon escaping the whiz-bang novelty that most advertising has employed it for.

At the office lately, there’s been quite a bit of stir about pretty cool developments in this technology. It seems 2008 and 2009 have been watershed years for Augmented Reality technology.

I think Augmented Reality technology has been with us for so long in science fiction we tend to underestimate how close we really are to scenarios depicted in movies like Total Recall (the security scan scene) or Minority Report (personalized, contextual ads).

In truth, I guess, the web as it stands is a babystep toward augmented reality. It’d be the nascent, Braille version of Augment Reality in that the text you read is enhanced via HTML to link to pertinent information (funny enough, ex: 1 2).

In recent years, the requisite technology has been given two big shots in the arm. The first by the zeal of a huge crowdsourcing movement through open source software development – of which Google is a big proponent. The second is by traditional media looking for new ways to communicate with (not just to) an ever more tech-savvy public – from great developments in e-book technology, to the great proliferation of ad-supported social networking sites, to the huge demand for 3D entertainment in the cinema and at home. Add in interactive and on-demand versions of traditionally restricted media, like AppleTV and iTunes and even Netflix and you have an arena just ripe for the possibilities (both good and bad) for Augmented Reality.

Of course this will be helped tremendously by, what I think is inevitable, municipal wireless rollouts. There’s too much of a push to be connected all the time, it’ll soon be difficult to find a device that isn’t automatically connected 24/7.

Hell, dummy terminals are making a comeback re-branded as cloud computing and it seems to be the next big thing™ in enterprise computing – why buy MS Office to install on your PC, when you can get a much larger variety of software that is always up-to-date and accessible from any access point in the world? Ditto for virtually all software, yes games, too.