Augmented reality

Last year I read a very good sci-fi book by Charles Stross, called Halting State. It makes such an excellent display of possible applications of augmented reality that I've become fascinated with the whole concept since then. In this book characters arrive to costume parties where costumes are completely virtual, cops use googles with overlays of criminal information and while patrolling the streets can spot who has a criminal record because it appears as a tooltip on the person while it walks, etc.




Augmented reality has the potential to have a huge impact in the way we live, and the technology to make it happen it's getting there fast. By now probably the best known example is Google Googles.

Recently the Augmented Reality toolkit was migrated to Silverlight, which in turn is very likely to be supported in Windows Mobile 7 by the end of the year, makes you think it's not anymore something confined to research labs, it's getting mainstream everyday. There are already several applications available for the Android, and iPhone markets, that make some basic usage of this concept, based on geotagged information, the mobile compass, GPS and image recognition algorithms.

In a first phase mobile devices will be the doors to this worlds of overlayed information. The following is a basic example of this.



As this technology becomes widely available the greatest challenge will probably be to stop thinking in terms of 2D windows, and change the mindset to make full usage of the possibilities in order to come up with the ideas that will be the hits of the years to come.



(this post is the sixth in a series titled technology watch for 2010)