Release Notes: On the Cusp of an Augmented Reality Revolution

Posted 10/02/2009 at 10:35am | by Will Smith

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You may not have heard of it before, but “augmented reality” is coming, and it’s more than just cool tech—it will change the world.

Augmented reality has been a Hollywood staple for the last 30 years—although it’s more commonly associated with robots and cyborgs than people or PC enthusiasts. Put simply, it’s a technology that overlays a real-world scene with relevant contextual information, directly from a computer. In Robocop and Terminator, augmented reality was used by the movie’s eponymous characters to overlay friend or foe info. In Minority Report, it was used to display targeted ads, unique to each individual, as they walked through a city landscape.
 
More recently in the real world, augmented reality has been used in advertisements, rendering 3D animations attached to 2D surfaces you hold up in front of a webcam. (Check these sites for demos: http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/ and http://www.psfk.com/2008/12/mini-augmented-reality-advertising-a-reality.html). The Mini-Cooper ad is especially neat, because you can explore a 3D rendering of a car using a 2D ad and your PC. To date, the applications of augmented reality tech have been cool, but not particularly useful.

That’s about to change. Armed with GPS sensors, accelerometers, and compasses, many smartphones—like the iPhone 3GS and Google Android phones—have the hardware required to determine your position and orientation in the world. With that info, your phone will be able to display a HUD, overlaying info from the Internet atop a direct feed from your phone’s camera.

The first of these apps is likely to be acrossair’s Nearest New York Subway app for the iPhone. The videos we’ve seen of the app are amazing—hold the phone parallel to the ground and you see a traditional 2D map of NYC’s subway system, complete with your location. When you hold the phone perpendicular, the camera turns on. As you rotate, it displays icons revealing the direction to and the key info for the nearest subway stations over a live feed from the camera. (To see the video, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps49T0iJwVg.)

As computing becomes more integrated with our day-to-day life, it becomes easy to envision ever-more-interesting use cases. I’d love a presence app—like Loopt or Google Latitude—that lets me see public profile information of people who share my coordinates in meatspace. Right now, I have no way of knowing that the guy standing next to me on the bus is my college roommate’s brother-in-law. But if my phone played a quick game of Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon with his Facebook profile, I might end up talking about something more interesting than the Giants’ game on our shared bus ride. In fact, with a large enough social circle, I may never meet another stranger again.

I can’t help but think that that would enrich my life. Isn’t that what technology is for?