Augmented Reality: A Preflection

A Story
While I usually take the bus to work in the morning so I can get in some reading, on my way home I usually end up taking the Metro and making the 20-minute hike up Mt. Saint Alban to our apartment building.  It’s nice to get some exercise and fresh air after sitting in front of a computer all day.

As I near the end of my walk each night, I walk right by the National Cathedral.  It’s been getting darker a little later these days as we move towards springtime, and so the light on the cathedral has been especially beautiful the past week or so.  Tonight as I walked by, I peered up at the heights of this enormous building, trying to make out some of the gargoyles.  I’ve always heard that there was a Darth Vader gargoyle up there somewhere, but I had never seen it and had no idea where it was.

I considered pulling out my iPhone to look it up on Wikipedia, but it just felt like a little too much effort and I had to hurry and grab some dinner before a basketball game on TV.  Besides, why stare down for three minutes at the glowing screen of my iPhone when I could spend those three minutes watching the glow of the setting sun on the facade of the cathedral?

In those three minutes looking at the cathedral, I thought about how lamentable it is that the wealth of information and the empowering connectivity of the Internet is tied to screens.  It is indeed a remarkable advance that, with devices like the iPhone, the full Internet is now in our pockets.  But it’s still on a screen in our pockets.  When we want to look something up on the web, we have to briefly tune out everything and everyone around us — our reality — so that we can focus on the screen. Why do we have to abandon the object of our research, in order to research it?

Augmented Reality: What Is It?
The time is approaching when this will no longer be the case.  In December, The Economist ran a piece in their Technology Quarterly about the growing field of computing and design called “augmented reality” (or sometimes “augmented vision”).  As opposed to virtual reality — which attempts to completely replace our perception of the “real” world with a digital one — augmented reality seeks to supplement the reality that we experience everyday with additional information.

The Wikipedia entry for augmented reality takes a fascinating approach to defining the history of this field.  One would think that augmented reality — even as an idea — could really only trace its roots about forty or fifty years, extending no further into the past than the early computer age.

But the article insists that “to describe the history of Augmented Reality is also to describe man’s journey of adding to the natural world he was born in.”  And thus the first entry in the timeline for augmented reality is not the creation of the first digital computer in 1938, but the estimated installation of cave paintings in Lascaux, France around 15,000 B.C. — “images in a darkened cave that started the idea of enhancing the real world.”

No, Seriously… What Is It?
Seen Terminator?  You know those couple of times they show the world as seen by Arnold?  He can see the world around him, but placed on top of that view are several different layers of information: targeting, facial recognition, etc.  Or think of modern day fighter jets with their “heads-up displays” which overlay speed, altitude, navigational, and weapons systems information on a transparent screen in the pilot’s main field of vision.  That’s augmented reality.

Do not be frightened or turned off by the fact that I’ve used two somewhat violent examples to illustrate augmented reality.  There are actually many peaceful, safety-promoting, and — dare I say it — fun implementations of augmented reality.  As Wikipedia mentions, the yellow first-down line on the TV when we watch football is a type of augmented reality.  Come to think of it, so are the scoreboard and score ticker that flash on the screen as we watch the game.  Car companies are starting to install heads-up displays in some vehicles that, in addition to showing some of the information usually found on your dashboard like speed and gas level, implement infrared sensors to overlay a night-vision layer over the windshield to help drivers avoid obstacles in the dark.

Another Story
I think that in my lifetime, we will see the introduction of some sort of visual enhancement — be it an optical implant or just a high-tech pair of eyeglasses — that will literally offer to turn us into the Terminator.  In fifty years, someone around my age will be walking down Wisconsin Avenue and have the same recollection about the Darth Vader gargoyle.  And he won’t have to choose between learning about the cathedral and enjoying how it holds the dying daylight.  He’ll be able to do both at the same time.

He’ll push a button on top of his phone, which itself will be wirelessly connected to the Internet at speeds higher than today’s laptops can acheieve.  The phone will use a technology similar to today’s Bluetooth to transmit visual data to a built-in antenna his glasses, which will then be projected in beyond-HD quality onto the lens.  Like me, this guy will have 20/20 vision, but he’ll still be wearing glasses in case a tweet comes in from the office asking if he can work overtime that weekend, or an e-mail from his friends inviting him to happy hour that night, attaching turn-by-turn directions that he can choose to project as arrows on the sidewalk — all on his lens, of course.

He looks up at the cathedral in the dim orange light — just as I did tonight — except this time, he pushes a button on his phone and says “link cloud – cathedral.”  Like bubbles in a pot of water that is about to reach its boiling point, little blue dots start to pop up over the building.  These dots are projected onto his view of the cathedral through the lens of his glasses.  He glances over the tags projected next to the dots: worship schedule, contact information, history, architecture.  He holds down a button on his phone and then whispers “architecture.”  A new series of dots explodes over the cathedral, sticking to the arches, the doors, the buttresses, the gargoyles.

Pausing at the crosswalk, he holds down the button and says “filter – gargoyles”.  Some of the dots fade away, and labels fade in next to the remaining orbs.  Not seeing the gargoyle he wants, he holds down the button and says “search – Darth Vader”.  Seconds later, all the dots fade.  The lens of his glasses darken slightly, leaving one small box clear bordered in bright green with the words “Darth Vader gargoyle” in white along the top of the box.  Holding the button again — “select – Wikipedia.”  In one dark margin of his glasses, a picture of the famous gargoyle appears; in the other margin, the scrolling text of the Wikipedia entry on the statue.

One last click of the button – “bookmark” – and then he rounds the corner and heads into his building.  His glasses grow clear again.  Across the bottom, a ticker shows the title and artist of the next track playing on his iPod.

The Final Frontier?
Think of the extraordinary doors that this type of technology could open.  The medium of the computer fades away.  The world becomes our medium again, and the computer no longer replaces it but enhances it.  We can return to paper books, because our iGlasses will overlay all the links and extra information we want as we turn the pages.  Everything we can access on our phones and computers now: e-mail, contacts, photos, phone numbers, news, blogs, weather, sports, music, social networking… it will all jump from the computer as a separate existence into our day-to-day.  We will have control over what shows up when, and we can always turn it off and on as we please.  We can unplug or plug in as easy as we turn our cell phones on or off vibrate mode.

Everywhere we look, we can learn more.  We’ll look at a metro station and be able to see a map, a schedule, and if there are any posted delays.  We’ll look at a restaurant and see the three most popular lunch items and their prices.  We’ll look at a bank and see our balances.  We’ll look at a movie theatre and see the times for that night’s showings, be able to say “two tickets at 7:30″ for a new release and automatically have Fandango purchase the tickets using our credit cards and have them waiting for us that night.

Amazing.

A Bridge Too Far?
Think of the extraordinary chaos that this type of technology could unleash.  My fictional character, distracted by his in-motion research, could have been hit by a UPS truck, itself driven by a driver distracted by the on-lens traffic information scrolling across his field of vision.

Our abilities to remember facts, or people’s faces, or even people’s names will be so underutilized that we’ll come to rely on our iGlasses as our secondary, electronic brains.  We’ll be Facebooking people while we talk to them, getting the updates on their lives while they do the same for us.  We’ll send links back and forth instead of conversing.  Our eyes will be so layered with information about the world around us that we’ll pass by friends on the street without seeing them.

And then there will be ads.  Everywhere we look, there will be ads.  You’ll look at someone’s shoes that you admire for two seconds too long, and a little box will open on the side of your lens showing you an ad from Nike and an option to order a pair, or to download turn-by-turn directions to the nearest retailer.

We think the link chasing on Wikipedia is addictive.  We go to one article today, and follow link after link until we’ve ended up on the other side of the Internet reading about something we had no intention of reading… and next thing you know, you’ve missed your bus or let your toast go cold in the toaster.  Think about how addicted and distracted we’d be if everywhere we looked — let me say that again: everywhere we looked — there was a link to be accessed.

One clear night, a father will be looking at the stars with his son.  They’ll sync their iGlasses so that the father can navigate his son through some of the constellations, the connections between the stars being traced on their lenses by soft red lines.  As they lay in the green grass of their backyard in the country, the father will call up the history of the astrological signs related to some of the constellations.  Then he’ll look up his horoscope.  As the text and images sweep over their screens, they smile and laugh and, indeed, bond.  But as they do so, on the other side of their darkened lenses, hundreds of miles above them, a brilliant shooting star streaks across the sky.  It leaves a soft, red, lonely trail — not unlike the red lines once projected on their lenses, but now covered up by a YouTube video — that endures for many seconds, and then fades away.  The entire event goes unseen by the pair.  The father and son will have learned together, shared together, laughed together.  But they will have missed seeing and sharing an event that, once upon a time, was worth more than any link or graphic could ever be worth.

Amazing.

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First image courtesy of website of Rep. Grace Napolitano.  Other images used under Creative Commons licenses courtesy of Flickr users charlietyack and Leonard Low.