Monday, July 05, 2010

Augmented reality is a combination of real-world elements, and virtual reality. An early incarnation was 'Sensorama', invented by Morton Heilig. It was designed to enable audiences to experience cinema through sight, smell, touch, and hearing. It did this by blowing wind, tilting you're body etc. Unfortunately for Heilig he never got financial backing to make it a product.

A form of Augmented reality is often used today in sports on television, such as in football where during a goal replay, certain players will be highlighted and yellow lines are overlaid onto the image of the pitch to show the direction and movement of play.

More recently it has been used in magazines, such as Esquire, which in December invited readers to download technology, enabling some greater interactivity with the magazine via a webcam. Also, the company T-post has invented a T-shirt/ Magazine, that you can play 'rock, paper, scissors' against a hand that emanates from the shirt, using a webcam.

AR technology is also being used in planes such as the F-35 Lightning II, which has no heads-up display, but instead sensors on the outside of the plane detect its surroundings, and this info is then shown on a display inside the helmet of the pilot.

AR is becoming a feature in devices such as the IPhone and phones using Google's Android System, both of which are capable of overlaying information on top of picture or video.

Another prototype AR device is called 'Sixth Sense' and has been, developed at MIT's (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) media lab. It's a necklace worn gadget designed to make everyday life easier. Want to take a picture? Just put your index fingers and thumbs into a square, and the system snaps a photo. Forgot your watch? Make a circling motion on your wrist and it tells you the time. The device does these and many other things using a combination of a camera, small projector, a mirror and a Smartphone.

All together it came to about $350 worth of kit. It works by having the mirror and camera examining the surrounding world, then relaying this information to the Smartphone. The Smartphone then calls up all the relevant information it can find out about what your looking at, this information is then transferred to the projector, which projects the image onto whatever is in front of you. To navigate the touch screens, the user must wear 4 differently colored finger pads. The inventor Pranav Mistry says the technology might be released as an open source in a matter of months.

Augmented reality business cards have also been invented; to see one that James Alliban made, visit http://gizmodo.com/5316153/augmented-reality-business-card-i-would-hire-him. An advantage of this is that you don't have to put as much info on the card itself, because when you put it in front of a webcam, more detail can be revealed.