Linked by Nicholas Blachford on Thu 19th Feb 2004 20:06 UTC
No, I'm not going all "New Age" on you, this time I'm looking at how computers are going to get a 3rd dimension and how this will change the way we interact with them. The previous parts of this series have been based on extrapolations or previous history. This time I'm looking further forward, when technologies currently in long term development become available and open up a whole new realm of possibilities.
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Augmented reality has a hell of a lot more to it than simply a monitor on your eye glasses' lenses. The system tracks your head movement and orientation and embeds digital images into your view of reality. So for example, instead of an actual LCD monitor sitting on your desk, your glasses will constantly monitor your position and orientation and which direction you are looking and make the same image appear to be the same physical location as a physical monitor would have been.
You could therefore embed the display anywhere: floating in the center of the room, on a wall, on the floor, on the face of a book....if you wanted to get away from the monitor, you can walk away.
If the glasses (I envision something the size and weight of eyeglasses, with a small computer the size of a watch battery behind one ear and a watch battery behind the other ear) are light enough and use little enough power that they can be wireless, then you could have a virtual 50" on your wall, 23" LCD on your desk, etc.
But of course the whole point of augmented reality isn't to make a rectangular display appear to float somewhere, but to make virtual objects appear to be physically located places where they actually don't.
Imagine an art gallery with blank walls, and the glasses let you see virtual paintings on the walls. Imagine a road with no signs, and the goggles show you both waypoints and the names of streets, buildings of your interest.
Imagine a battlefield where every soldier can have the positions of their squadron overlaid with reality, and foreign objects highlighted, categorized, and tracked in real time on their glasses. Waypoints, objectives, statuses, a flood of information embedded in reality (and of course a way to reduce the flood to currently relavant information).
I think we will eventually enter a time when physical reality is far less important than the digital overlays that we will create and share. We will need to build far fewer things, and everything will be more efficient, even daily life.