One of the technological revolutions just around the corner is the wonderful world of augmented reality. For those of you who aren’t too familiar with this concept, it will within a few years become quite mainstream and there will be many applications of its use that you will depend on daily. Augmented reality refers to software applications that place generated graphical, aural and textual information on top of real-life imagery. At the moment, this is mostly the realm of mobile phones such as the iPhone or Android; however, in years to come many expect that there will be optical versions available that are similar to eye-glasses or even contact lenses.
What I want to do is take a look at some of the possible applications of augmented reality – where it will be of great positive use, where it will tap into the more unfortunate aspects of society, and finally where it could (and most likely will) be abused and cross boundaries that we really may not be ready to cross. I’m not going to be able to cover every type of augmented reality application here; but we’ll work our way through a good selection of basic categories to get you thinking about where this technology might progress. I’m going to be splitting this up into a number of different posts over the next few days, so stay tuned and come back for the rest of the series!
Having said that, I’m going to start with some of the exciting applications – the things that we get to look forward to…
Part One: The Good
Navigation
One of the first widespread applications of augmented reality that we are going to see will revolve around navigation. These are the kind of augmented reality applications that are already available, and they are only going to become more commonplace. We are all now used to satellite navigation systems in both our cars and on our phones, but within the next year or so this is going to be taken to next level and you are going to see displays that overlay directions on top of an image of what you are seeing in front of you.
By combining software such as Google Street View with navigation programs, and then coupling that with the compass and GPS available in your mobile phone, you will be able to hold up your phone in front of you and view your needed directions on top of what you are seeing. Finding your nearest tube station or bus stop, department store or art gallery, will be as simple as selecting your destination and then following the trail. In the near future this will be done through your mobile phone, but in the more distant – but still foreseeable – future this will likely be done through a worn headset of some description.
Encyclopedic Knowledge
The mobile internet boom has shown us that no question is too obscure to ask anymore. Within moments of asking a question, you will often have somebody around you who is typing it into their phone and providing you with the answer (or at least a number of possible answers) within a few minutes. Augmented reality is going to take this to a whole new level.
Firstly, you will have location based information. The history of buildings and landmarks will be clearly displayed, and will quite often be accompanied by video or sound of some description. Educational materials will be greatly enhanced through the use of this, with one of the more common examples given being a field trip to an old battlefield whereby you can walk around the physical area and learn about particular locations and movements within it.
Beyond this, and more impressively, will be the use of object recognition technology. Want to know what model of car that is? How about the history of a famous painting? Or even which style of art or architecture a particular object belongs to? How to name different objects in any language you can imagine?
All of these examples, and many many more will become possible in the very near future. Of course, the accuracy of such applications will need to be honed and tuned over time as technology progresses – but you can be assured that such applications will arise. The entirety of human encyclopedic knowledge will at some point be placed onto our viewpoint of physical reality, a truly exciting prospect!
Social Media
Social networking is about to get a whole lot more real. Augmented reality and social media are just destined to be together, and indeed many of the current and coming-soon applications take advantage of this easy fit. Twitter is going to be the first form of social media that you are going to see in this arena, and there are already applications available that overlay tweets onto their real-world locations.
Walk past a restaurant and you’ll be able to see what previous customers thought of it, hold it up to a movie poster and see an aggregated rating from thousands of people who have seen it, or even tighten the focus and just see what your friends and connections think of various things in your locality. Think of this like a form of virtual graffiti, but hopefully with more of a purpose than random tagging and profanity!
Taking this application even further, it will be possible to have details on display of the location of those you know (if they want you to know, of course) – you’ll know how far away they are, what they are commenting about, and possibly even where they are headed. You thought you knew a lot about your friends now with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter? Just imagine how much more we’re all going to be connected in the near future. Of course, this brings up some important ethical concerns; which we will be exploring throughout this series of articles.