MIT Technology Turns Humans into Carebears
10 02 2009
In a demo presented at the TED conference last week, an MIT research group gave us a flavor of what the future of augmented reality might be. Basically, their system involved a wearable projector, camera, and computer. Using computer vision, the camera would identify what was in front of you, then project information on to this object or person. Have a look at the video below for some neat augmented reality applications that we might see in the future.
Don’t expect this technology to hit the mass market next week; yet, what’s exciting to see is that researchers today are not only thinking of useful applications of augmented reality, but that they are then able to actually build and demonstrate them, even if the conditions must be controlled. Visually augmented reality is already in the mass market in the form of in-vehicle GPS (amongst others), and as technology improves to be able to serve us more and more relevant information with fewer and fewer manually given clues, this field will only grow.
Personally, I doubt that carebear-style “light streaming from tummy” design will take off; with improvements in displays and optics, information-empowered glasses or contact lenses would be far less obtrusive. Regardless of how this technology eventually gains market acceptance, kudos to professor Pattie Maes and student researcher Pranav Mistry for an inspiring technology demonstration.
See an in-depth write up of this technology at Wired.com
Its prety cool indeed.
I dont think projection will take off either…I can see a projected keyboard on phones being a technology that could fill a niche before HMDs are good enough, but apart from that it wont work in the long run.
Its completely impossible to get contrast in the day, for one thing.
And another, you always need a surface.
Still, for the price they made it for its really neat.
> Still, for the price they made it for its really neat.
It’s not commercial yet… MIT graduates are not cheap, a commercial product would be significantly more expensive even if it becomes mass market.
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