Augmented Reality Goes Mobile

Via BusinessWeek:

It was the shake heard ’round the world. On Aug. 27, 2009, überblogger Robert Scoble uncovered a hidden software feature buried within an iPhone application that provides access to Yelp.com reviews.

The secret, it turns out, was that users needed to shake the phone to activate the capability, known as Monocle. In the wake of Scoble’s discovery, shared publicly via FriendFeed, iPhone users far and wide could be seen shaking their iPhones to get access to the new feature. Yet the frenzy was about more than the novelty of how to open it, or even the trove of Yelp.com reviews.

The bigger prize was in how that information shows up on the phone. Once Monocle is activated, users looking through the iPhone camera can see reviews and other information about restaurants, stores, and other businesses in the direction the camera is pointing. Monocle was one of the first smartphone applications in the U.S. to use a technology known as augmented reality, which meshes digital information with actual images of the subject of that data. For many, augmented reality evokes images of what the Terminator sees as he homes in on a potential target, or the real time data seen by Luke Skywalker as he scans the barren Tatooine desertscape through a pair of field goggles.

Read the full story here

Another Use for Your Phone: ‘Augmented Reality’

Via Yahoo! Tech News:

You’re walking down the street, looking for a good place to eat. You hold up your cell phone and use it like the viewfinder on a camera, so the screen shows what’s in front of you. But it also shows things you couldn’t see before: Brightly colored markers indicating nearby restaurants and bars.

Turn a corner, and the markers reflect the new scene. Click a marker for a restaurant, and you can see customer reviews and price information. Decide you’d rather be sightseeing? The indicators are easily changed to give information about the buildings you’re passing.

This computer-enhanced view of the world is not just available to cyborgs in science-fiction movies. Increasingly it can be found on cell phones, for free or on the cheap, through programs that provide “augmented reality.”

These applications take advantage of the phones’ GPS and compass features and access to high-speed wireless networks to mash up super-local Web content with the world that surrounds you.

That means you can see available apartments on the block you’re moseying down. You can view photos other people have taken at the park you’re passing, or find the nearest bus stop or hotel room — all by just holding your phone up and peering at its screen.

The possibilities for melding the virtual and actual worlds have just started to become apparent. The first phones with Google‘s Android operating system, which enables augmented reality, have come out in the past year. The iPhone became augmented-reality-friendly with the compass that debuted in June on the iPhone 3GS. Apple also recently joined Google in making it possible for software developers to overlay images on the phone’s camera view.

As cell phones get even smarter and GPS and wireless networks improve, we may soon be spending more time in a virtually enhanced world, using information gathered from the Internet to inform everything from eating to playing video games.

Read the full story here

Digital Contacts Will Keep an Eye on Your Vital Signs

From Wired.com. Sci-fi becomes reality:

Forget about 20/20. “Perfect” vision could be redefined by gadgets that give you the eyes of a cyborg.

The tech industry calls the digital enrichment of the physical world “augmented reality.” Such technology is already appearing in smartphones and toys, and enthusiasts dream of a pair of glasses we could don to enhance our everyday perception. But why stop there?

Scientists, eye surgeons, professors and students at the University of Washington have been developing a contact lens containing one built-in LED, powered wirelessly with radio frequency waves.

Eventually, more advanced versions of the lens could be used to provide a wealth of information, such as virtual captions scrolling beneath every person or object you see. Significantly, it could also be used to monitor your own vital signs, such as body temperature and blood glucose level.

Why a contact lens? The surface of the eye contains enough data about the body to perform personal health monitoring, according to Babak Parvis, a University of Washington professor of bionanotechnology, who is working on the project.

“The eye is our little door into the body,” Parvis told Wired.com.

A contact lens with augmented-reality powers would take personal health monitoring several steps further, Parvis said, because the surface of the eye can be used to measure much of the data you would read from your blood tests, including cholesterol, sodium, potassium and glucose levels.

And that’s just the beginning. Because this sort of real-time health monitoring has been impossible in the past, there’s likely more about the human eye we haven’t yet discovered, Parvis said. And beyond personal health monitoring, this finger-tip sized gadget could one day create a new interface for gaming, social networking and, well, interacting with reality in general.

Read the whole article here

If You’re Not Seeing Data, You’re Not Seeing

From Wired

As you shove your way through the crowd in a baseball stadium, the lenses of your digital glasses display the names, hometowns and favorite hobbies of the strangers surrounding you. Then you claim a seat and fix your attention on the batter, and his player statistics pop up in a transparent box in the corner of your field of vision.

It’s not possible today, but the emergence of more powerful, media-centric cellphones is accelerating humanity toward this vision of “augmented reality,” where data from the network overlays your view of the real world. Already, developers are creating augmented reality applications and games for a variety of smartphones, so your phone’s screen shows the real world overlaid with additional information such as the location of subway entrances, the price of houses, or Twitter messages that have been posted nearby. And publishers, moviemakers and toymakers have embraced a version of the technology to enhance their products and advertising campaigns.

“Augmented reality is the ultimate interface to a computer because our lives are becoming more mobile,” said Tobias Höllerer, an associate professor of computer science at UC Santa Barbara, who is leading the university’s augmented reality program. “We’re getting more and more away from a desktop, but the information the computer possesses is applicable in the physical world.”

Read more »