Bruce Sterling gave a talk at the launch party for Layar's Reality Browser which is one of the big players in the Augmented Reality scene. I've written excitedly about Augmented Reality recently, and Sterling is drinking a similar Kool-aid, calling it a "techno visionary dream come true" among other superlatives. The basic idea is just to lay data over the top of a live video feed, turning our handheld video cameras (a.k.a., our phones) into third eyes with access to the vast knowledge stored on the internet. In other words, not "virtual reality" where the user is immersed in an entirely artificial computer generated world, but "augmented reality" where computer generated graphics are overlayed on top of a real time view of the world. Something like a Terminator's view of the world. In any case, to me this is a pretty weak talk by Sterling (although the bar is about as high as it can go regarding his talks,) so maybe not worth watching. But it is interesting that this is what he's excited about at the moment.
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- jim 8-28-2009 3:23 pm