Reality isn't what is used to be. With increasingly powerful technologies, the human universe is being reimagined way beyond Google Glass' photo-tapping and info cards floating in space above your eye. The future is fashionable eyewear, contact lenses or even bionic eyes with immersive 3D displays, conjuring up a digital layer to "augment" reality, enabling entire new classes of applications and user experiences.
Like most technologies that eventually reach a mass market, augmented reality, or AR, has been gestating in university labs, as well as small companies focused on gaming and vertical applications, for nearly half a century. Emerging products like Google Glass and Oculus Rift's 3D virtual reality headset for immersive gaming are drawing attention to what could now be termed the "wearable revolution," but they barely scratch the surface of what's to come.
The wearable revolution can be traced back to Ivan Sutherland, a ground-breaking computer scientist at the University of Utah who in 1965 first described a head-mounted display with half-silvered mirrors that let the wearer see a virtual world superimposed on the real world. In 1968 he was able to demonstrate the concept, which was dubbed "The Sword of Damocles."
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Wednesday, June 19, 2013
The next big thing in tech: Augmented reality
Via ComputerWorld: