Augmented Reality is more than Virtual Reality

ISMAR09

Things are moving in the field of Augmented Reality (AR). At least, public interest has increased a lot, which may greatly be attributed to the emergence and press coverage of some still basic but already useful mobile phone apps, mainly any sort of location aware city or museum guides. Whose appearance is just fueled by rising processing power but also indicates rising interest within the software industry.
A survey of Google search frequencies recently done by Christopher Stapleton shows a dramatic increase of "Augmented Reality" since the beginning of 2009, now having greatly surpassed "Virtual Reality"
(by the way, in my opinion AR is a more general topic than VR anyway).

At the ISMAR 2009 now, beneath a considerably grown number of contributions, at least one mobile phone giant, Nokia, showed they are very interested in the field (have been for a while already), and several other large companies including Microsoft were present or supporting the event in this or the other way.

Good, light-weight display glasses for AR were still missing though, and despite of many very interesting contributions, most that was shown still belonged to the academic realm (no wonder, this is an academic conference, but industrial contributions are not excluded).

A lot of information about particular ISMAR09 contributions you will find at Ori Inbar's site, including many demo videos about current projects.

Beneath really wearable near-eye displays, many other topics of "The End of Hardware" still have to be brought to reality. Many Ideas from the book have never even been tried up to now, the mask display for example, or accommodation base depth layer selection (ghost objects) as well.

While the recent, sharp rise of interest in AR is undoubtfully fueled by the "phone pointing" applications mushrooming in Apple's app store and everywhere else, causing attention from just anybody and a huge media coverage, all under the flag of AR, these gadgets are neither fitting my approach of virtual devices, nor Ron Azuma's frequently cited AR definition: they do not create any virtual objects merged into the real world. Nothing that replaces real hardware. Just a faint glimpse of all the possibilities ahead.

Nevertheless, these current apps are bringing AR the kind of attention that it especially needs right now, as technology is reaching the brink of ability for the real thing. Up to now, I thought the first killer application for kick starting AR would be a gaze operated mobile phone built into glasses, but maybe I was wrong and the simple "augmented navigator" apps we are seeing now will already accomplish at least as much.

Next, people will be asking for a hands-free variety, for a visual equivalent of their current phone headset. The we will have it.

Another interesting development: ACM is announcing the first "Augmented Human (AH) International Conference" for next April.
As you may know, in The End of Hardware I also included a long term consideration of human development, beyond AR and towards brain add-ons and artificial brains, so this is a topic I'm really interested in, and I think you will be interested as well.

By the way, the book's sales have also risen sharply since September already, again indicating that many more people are now entering the field.

Rolf R. Hainich

 


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