November 01, 2004
Augmented Reality
The Eyes Have It
Augmented reality is about taking real things and real places and adding a layer of computer generated information on top of them. In the Thursday, October 28, 2004 Feature article: The Eyes Have It by David Pescovitz, you can read about how tomorrow's mobile phones may project the wireless web right into your eyeballs.
As a near-sighted person sensitive to to the glare of sunlight, this sends shivers through my retinas, but the commercial issue is space -- mobile screens are small and, as Pescovitz says, "there's not much room for expansion inside your pocket", so virtual retinal displays (VRD) are in the developmental stage.
"The small screens and narrow fields of view of mobile devices don't work well with the human vision system," Professor Thomas Furness, director of the Human Interfaces Laboratory, says. "When we first started talking about VRD, the idea was to create a system that requires very little power but can be connected to a PDA or cell phone to deliver a wide field of view with high brightness. For mobile computing applications where you want to overlay digital information on top of what you see, you need the luminance to compete with the outside world."
Augmented reality--computer-generated data superimposed on the real world: You can walk around the city with information about everything you see, passing before your eyes.
Posted by newradio at November 1, 2004 11:17 AM
