When writing The Digital Sea, invisibility was one of the cool effects I thought was possible with ubiquitous augmented reality. I didn’t expect to see tangible examples so soon. Granted, without AR glasses, all the effects are static on the screen and only eye candy. But what glorious eye candy Fukatsu-san makes. The predator alien would be proud.
The second video from yummyfuture shows us how to make ghost images of furniture (or whatever you’d like to do.)
The Kinect has become the all-in-one sensor bar of choice for modders everywhere. The ability for the Kinect to do facial and gesture recognition, sensing 3D under any ambient light condition, combined with a rapidly expanding hacker tools, has made it indispensable for true AR.
While the Kinect Hacks site has been documenting the every aspect of the accelerating progress, I’m just interested in the applications for augmented reality. This one caught my eye today as the implications reminded me of one of my favorite dystopia films – The Running Man. The resolutions and seamless adjustments are decades away, but it’s fun to imagine anyway.
We’re a long way from fooling the man on the street, but augmented reality may soon play trickery on your TV screens. This video montage combining scenes from movies like The Running Man and Wag the Dog; and bits of real-time AR from the last few years makes for a convincing argument about the future of this new medium.
I’m partial to such obscuring of reality as it speaks to my science fiction interests. Whenever I see a video like this is makes me think of one of my favorite authors, Philip K. Dick. And while this argument is probably twenty years too soon, the ubiquitous use of AR may eventually enchant the populous with its devious wares. Though you may scoff at such influences, think long and hard about how current technologies and techniques subject the masses to keep the absence of reason as their masters.
But like I said, that argument is twenty-years too soon, or twenty-years too late, if you consider the wealth of propaganda techniques which by and large are more insidious in their use. Of course, the real danger is not that sophisticated techniques will be developed to hide or alter the truth, its that they will know everything about you so that they can tailor their obfuscation to maximum effect. But I digress.
Games Alfresco 