augmented reality is spilling from sci-fi into real life

Augmented reality has popped up in conversations three times in the past week. As Wikipedia educated me a while back, it's about adding a digital information layer to real things around us so that our environment is expanded and, possibly, becomes interactive. In this sense, reality is augmented by computer generated imagery that one can generate or capture with special devices. For example, the virtual reality gloves and glasses, loaded with sensors, that sci-fi books imagined for long now, or this handy, potentially cheap device for making sense of your surroundings, presented by Patti Maes at TED as a sixth sense for accessing relevant meta information.

All nice, but why now and what can it do for us? Why would one need more information in a world drowning in information excess? Ironically, because it helps one make better sense of existing, if incomplete information, and benefits range from, hmm, more information, to more informed decisions. It has come to our attention now due to no longer being confined to the world of games and VR/AR gadgets—visors, headsets, gloves. No, augmented reality is now on some of our tiniest computers, the mobile phones: Monocle from Yelp (iPhone), Wikitude (Android, iPhone), and Layar (Android). Exciting, no? I will be coming back to this subject once I got to play with Wikitude, which only works with the iPhone 3GS not available in this household, or even Layar if I one get an Android (a tempting thought for months now).

The video below is an exercise in imagination to how augmented reality might work beyond our mobile phones. Is the world at large going to turn into our display? Is it going to become browsable? Will we escape to Second Life and the likes more often, or much less? We will, for sure, hear about AR more frequently, as it's one of those developments to split society into love and hate groups. Tune your ears :)

Map/Territory from timo on Vimeo. Here's a related article.

Update, November 13th 2009: And another sign that things are looking up for AR (a buzz word that will come to mean as many unconnected things as web 2.0 and such): the first augmented reality development camp to take place on December 5th in San Francisco (where else?).