How ‘augmented reality’ will make boring cities beautiful
August 11, 2011 | Source: SmartPlanet
Augmented city (credit: Junaio)
Augmented reality software company Junaio is showing off what’s possible with the world’s fastest mobile phones.
In the near future, as you stroll down the street, billboards and street signs will change to suit your interests. Ghostly arrows will float in the air, pointing you toward your destination. Buildings, vehicles, the apparel of those you pass, and the very fabric of the reality you perceive will all be as changeable as your wardrobe.
That’s the vision of futurists and science fiction authors like Vernor Vinge, and increasingly, it’s the reality brought to us by mobile devices. Junaio’s goal is to “make the digital world surrounding us a natural experience,” which means “not just showing some type of information on top of a camera image, but truly embedding the digital information into the real world as a natural experience.”
Download junaio for free at the iPhone App Store or Android Marketplace and experience the Augmented City.
Comments (4)
by spudmachine
Looks really cool, and I wish the inventors a lot of success; but I see two problems with this.
1. Will it scale? Imagine at some point in the future, when an augmented “Times Square” in New York is online. You go there, hold up your phone and you’re bombarded with augmented info. How do you see what’s good from what’s “augmented spam”?
You can argue that context filtering will solve that problem, but augmented reality is most usefult to tell you the things you don’t know. If I already know there’s a cheap electronics shop “over there”, why would I need a phone to tell me? Context filtering works best by telling you things about topics you’re already interested in, so IMHO these two technologies (augmented reality and context filtering) are somwhat at odds.
2. Why would I walk around with a phone held up in front of me all the time? I’d look like an idiot! And I’d get killed in seconds as I walk into the steet withhout looking. The best user interface for this would be some kind of smart “sunglasses” that have an embedded, 3D “head up display” (HUD).
Now THAT would be useful. Imagine you’re in Tokyo and haven’t a clue what all these Japanese signs say. Your augmented reality HUD translates them into your native language.
That capability will definitely come in the future because it’s so darned useful, but it has to be shrunk several orders of magnitude from where it would be today.
SPuD
by star0
What I’d like to see is an app that lets you see the city not as it is (though visually-enhanced), but how it could be. Imagine holding up a cellphone with back camera to a building and seeing its roof covered with food (urban farming) in the view-screen; imagine seeing a sidewalk rising up over the city, lined with flowers and trees; imagine seeing skycars in the city skyline; imagine seeing a high-speed rail line of the future; imagine seeing the city lined with extra trees, where now there is only pavement; and so on.
The idea is that by showing people a vision for how their world *could* be, they would say to themselves, “what’s stopping us from making this a reality?”.
With top-of-the-line chips (like the new qualcomm S4 krait) and Locata’s ultrafine gps, it wouldn’t take much to make an app like this.
by peterb
Yeah, I’m thinking of taping my mobile phone across my eyes, and a buying a mobile phone battery backpack so I don’t miss any AR stuff wherever I am. Hang on a sec – what if (shush) ADVERTISERS ever get wind of this…..won’t they ruin it for everyone?
Phew, that was just a bad dream. – advertisers/spammers can’t possibly latch onto this – butthe vision I had seemed so real…
I’m sure AR will be streamed-to-sonsciousness at some point, but I’m inclined to think there’s an eetnsy-weeentsyy-teeny-weeny breakthrough waiting to happen for AR, that overcomes the (maybe it’s just me) problem of having to watch your mobile phone all the time and ignoring the traffic.
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by Khannea Suntzu
So they can do this with humans too. Basicly I may one day see all beautiful people around me, as they really are on the inside,
Nice.