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Excerpt - read on the whole on:
http://www.secondtense.com/2010/09/scott-pilgrim-harbinger-augmented.html
"A Harbinger of Things To Come
I have many friends and colleagues working with augmented reality and social media and agree that it will continue to grow. But I think we will all be surprised at the scope at just how pervasive it will become. Because Augmented Reality is an extension of expressionism, it's more than just a new technological wonder. In fact, it's not a technological discovery, it's something implicitly embedded in human thinking, that technology has slowly been able to evolve to express in more complex and accessible ways.
Augmented Reality has been here with us forever, actually. Look at the definition of Augmented Reality - it is contextual information laid out on top of the "real" physical world. By this definition, we can look back to the dawn of civilization. Language is the most basic, ancient form of AR, where our words both express and sculpt the word. One might even agree that language makes possible all acts of civilization itself. And through history, all sorts of means of communication have been layered on top of our physical world to add reality.
So now we live in an age where we can manipulate reality by putting the physical world on a screen and adding images, text, sound, and video on top of it. In another 5 years, we'll have Heads Up Display glasses that will do the same thing; first they'll start as important tools for jobs, but like computers in the 90s, they'll spread from our jobs to our common life. Then in 10 years, we'll have contact lenses that do the same thing - in fact, they're already being tested in the earliest stages. Imagine the applications people will write for these! Data for almost anything, customization for how we view the world - I should do a blog post just listing the possibilities, but a few off the top of my head:
- Automatic facial recognition and linking to peoples' social network profiles.
- Scavenger Hunt games based on what you see - like "spot the VW beetle"
- Enhanced target acquisition for soldiers
- Jobs that have complex sets of parts will have them all labeled / highlighted, such as in surgery, auto mechanics, or watch repair.
- Construction supervisors seeing how pieces of building are supposed to be constructed and being able to compare to the actual work.
- Visual E-mail
Speaking of which - why haven't I read or seen any science fiction with this? If anyone knows of any, please post in the comments.
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