Michael Jennings used the term ‘unaugmented‘ to refer to the frightening prospect of leaving the house without an iPhone. I have an Android phone and know what he means. I usually use it to navigate to wherever I’m going.
In the novel Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge describes a near-future world in which people wear contact lenses that can overlay displays onto reality. This virtual-reality world that exists within and is composited onto the real-world is called augmented reality. In Rainbows End, people are in constant communication, receive information from all sorts of sources, and can choose between a variety of overlays on the real world that anyone can create for information or entertainment, including elaborate multiplayer games. Vinge also imagines the economic consequences of the technology. The world is awash with information and careers are built on selecting and filtering it. If you want information fast, money will buy the efforts of anyone and everyone, gathering and sifting anonymously on the network. Meanwhile, entertainment companies vie for the greatest audience shares and compete with school projects that involve creating multimedia augmented reality shared experience extravaganzas. Do you want your local high street themed like Middle-earth or Caprica?
There are a few bits of hardware that would make this sort of technology work particularly well: a wearable input device such as one that detects small finger movements or whispered voice commands for control; a wearable display such as glasses or contact lenses that can either emit an image or transmit light from the real world; and some apparatus for detecting where you are and where you are looking to some considerable accuracy.
But we are already starting to see applications that might be part of this Rainbows End future. Google Maps on a phone with GPS is a good start. Yelp adds the ability to find interesting things nearby, with user reviews and photos. Foursquare, Gowalla and BrightKite combine location with other social networking features and game aspects like rewards which can businesses can interact with. All of these are ways of gathering and sharing information, and they have open APIs that mean information can be combined in novel ways by third parties creating new applications, sometimes called mashups.
There are pure games, like Pac Manhattan, Zombies Run and ARhrrrr. There is even a real model helicopter that can fly in augmented reality.
Layar is particularly interesting. It overlays 3D graphics onto an image from the phone’s camera. It uses the phone’s GPS to know where you are, and the phone’s gyroscopes and compass to know where you’re looking. Pick from dozens of layers to overlay onto the real-world image. Mostly these are labels providing information about the real world so you can, for example, look through your phone and see nearby places that have Wikipedia articles or user reviews. Some layers put 3D objects into the real world for games, art or information.
A lot of these apps, web sites and services will come and go, but it’s starting to look very much like a large number of people in the tech industry have read Rainbows End and are setting out to make it come true.
