Watson Will Make Us Superhumans

Posted on March 5, 2011 by thomaskcarpenter

The continued advance of computer intelligence, riding the rails of Moore’s Law, have made events like IBM’s Watson win over two champions on Jeopardy inevitable.  While thoughts of the Singularity, a future in which we cannot predict because computers will out-innovate humans, are fascinating to consider, I prefer a human centered future.  And augmented reality has a large place in a human centered world.

While the underpinnings of this chess trainer demonstration with its Hiro-markers are circa 2009, the ideas still play out.  Instead of concerns that computers like Watson will replace humans, I believe that Watson will help us take advantage of our natural abilities.  Instead of wasting time memorizing trivia, we can focus on the combining of dissimilar ideas into new synergies.

So I say, bring on Watson.  Just with a side of AR, please.

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IBM Serves an Augmented Reality Wimbledon

Posted on June 18, 2009 by rouli

While SPRXMobile enables you to experience an augmented version of the Netherlands (and the whole world in the the future), IBM has more modest goals in mind. Available from next Monday on the Android store, IBM’s Seer Android Beta will add some AR magic to the Wimbledon tennis tournament. Using it, visitors can find facilities on ground (locating the nearest restrooms), but more impressively, they can “point the phone at a tennis court, find out the court number and also who’s playing and more crucially, who’s winning”.

As with Layar, IBM Seer Android Beta lets you choose between different layers of metadata (and it seems that unlike Layar, one can choose to see more than one layer at a time). Moreover, the not specialized name of this app (i.e. not calling it “IBM Augmented Wimbledon”) suggests that IBM may have more deep interest in augmented reality location based services. Days will tell if my hunch here is correct.

More details can be found here.
(via PicturePhoning.com)

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