The Augmented World Experience
une 4, 2013, Augmented World Expo, Santa Clara, CA—Avi Bar-Zeev from Syntertainment talked about “Inside the Looking Glass”. AR is starting to become cool as the devices get smaller and more functional.
The newest technologies are blurring the distinctions between augmented and virtual realities and making them into a spectrum of experiences. Eventually, the hardware will be in a contact lens and the ability to add graphics and sound to any image will be ubiquitous. Augmented reality is not actually real, it just changes your perception of what you view.
Augmented perception allows for changes interactions. Just as all games change technologies, AR is changing people to add (virtual) superpowers. We consider superpowers to be abilities like teleportation, directing energy, seeing the non-visible, flying, etc. Our technologies have given us virtual equivalents to superpowers.
TV and phones let us see things that may not really exist, and let us see and talk to others who are outside the range of unassisted communications. The wheel lets us move objects with much less energy than is possible unaided, and airplanes let us fly. Computers bring all of the base, static information to us on a moment’s notice. All of these “superpowers” already exist, but AR will make them more accessible and useful to the average person.
The emergence of crowd solving will advance AR capabilities much faster than any single company could. We will see holographic imaging and telepresence combined to allow almost real face-to-face communications. The “ghosting” of telepresence images for the remote person will be an accepted norm, as seen in movies like “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” where Yoda sits in the conference room as a virtual presence. With the current pace of technology developments, we might see “ghosting” exceeding texting by the end of this decade.
Spatial entertainment will use projectors to animate objects. Creative projection will enable 3-D visualization for objects and data mining. The ability to capture everything will evolve to a life streaming function, and will enable life surfing, to watch an event from another’s point of view. Perceptional intelligence will give us a better understanding of people and emotions.
We will develop a ground truth of the world as we digitize the analog environment and gain a fundamental understanding of our natures. The challenges to come will be more social than technical. Who owns the data, and what are the boundaries for digital interactions? What are the social rules and conventions that will be changed, and which ones will remain? What are the limits for using AR in public places? Already, YouTube has etiquette suggestions for Google Glass users.
The enabling infrastructure has to grow to meet the demands for bandwidth and storage. The Internet will need to change some of its underlying architectures to meet the need for even more video and AR. The other part of these changes will be that we will have a magic interface that makes our thoughts into something visible and close to real.
