BEAUTIFUL NEW CHANGED REALITIES
Technology enables our most profound change, outside of natural forces, that is. Augmented reality is developing into one of the most powerful and beautiful application sets. It is changing the way we experience the world.
From Google Glass, which augments vision and information processing, to ARTtwo50, an app that offers augmented envisioning, to mind-controlled prosthetics that enable augmented movement, augmented reality is enhancing our human capabilities by mega-leaps and bounds.
Technology can now enhance all of our senses, as well as an increasing number of our responses. Adding graphics, sounds, smell, and haptic (touch) feedback to our “real” world experience, in real time, we become more. These enhancements are refreshed continually to reflect the movements of your head and body.
Augmented technology has been around for a few years, in very early rough form. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry presented SixthSense, one of the first augmented-reality systems, which they developed as part of MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group, in February 2009, at the TED conference.
SixthSense contained some of the basic elements that today’s systems use: a camera, a smartphone, and a mirror. Since then, the addition of GPS, increased interconnectivity, and other advances have made augmentation much more “real.”
By 2015, the augmented reality technology will be widely used in the education field for advanced learning and for teaching technologies. The virtual and augmented reality markets are project to be worth $1.06 Billion by 2018, according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets.
Advances such as Google Glass, which only recently lit up public radar this past April, are just scratching the surface of connected augmented and virtual reality devices. The Glass headset comes equipped with a camera, microphone, and tiny screen perched over its user’s right eye, giving you a first-person POV control center for Google+, Gtalk, Maps, YouTube and search.
Video: Courtesy of Google Glass
Google Glass displays information in a smartphone-like hands-free format, that can communicate with the Internet via natural language voice commands.
Glass is designed to navigate and record the Googlesphere (aka “everything”) in the real world. From a Maps-driven cross-country adventure to YouTube immersive experiential video, Glass can make it happen for you in real time.
With a seemingly unlimited universe of possible application, Google Glass is already starting to change the way we can do things. For one of the most creative examples, it is blurring the lines between making and watching films. Every user is both a movie-maker and an audience.
Glass wearers merely need to live cool lives and record them as they go to create their film stories. Whoever sees their films become more than voyeurs, they “become” the experiencer.
Instead of seeing a film in third-person, you will be able to see it from each character’s POV. You “are” a co-star in “Luv Deluxe,” a new music video by Cinnamon Chasers. This 5+-minute short film is addictive to watch. You are “the guy” and this is “your” story.
You experience the whole trip, believing, then tumbling forth in disbelief, then believing again, as augmented reality switches, fluidly, from one version to another. It won best new video award at SXSW13.
Journalist S.T. VanAirsdale wrote about this in the context of the post-cinema world, in an article for the Tribeca Film Festival blog, “People watch movies for experience -- the experience of the visuals, the story, the characters and everything else onscreen.”
VanAirsdale imagine that you might watch them live on YouTube, where a special guest director calls the shots from a control room. Or, you might choose your own views on a raw-feed live stream on Google+.
In May, Google shipped 8000 devices to early adopters in the United States. Google Glass will not be available to the public until the end of 2013, at the earliest.
CastAR, created by Jeri Ellsworth and her team at Technical Illusions, is a multi-user augmented reality system that overlays 3D visuals over your natural surroundings using 3D projector glasses. The glasses themselves aren’t particularly beautiful to look at -- we’re hoping they’ll step up their game on this front -- but they deliver beautiful experiences and inspire cool possibilities.
CastAR won the Editor’s Choice and Educator’s Choice award at the World Maker Faire 2013. Because the position of the head is tracked so accurately, it fuels additional applications such as 3D audio or using the head movements, to directly control steering. Think what it can do for flight simulators!
Technical Illusions will try to bring the CastAR to market with Kickstarter and plan to implement it, first for PC and Android, followed by iOS and Linux. The launch date is expected to be October 15th. Shipping could begin as soon as November 2014.
Photo: Courtesy of ARTtwo50
ARTtwo50 is a platform which uses augmented reality to help you to envision what a piece of artwork will look like in your home before you buy it. And then, ARTtwo50 sells the the original pieces for for just $250.
You can download the iPad app for free, before browsing some of the pieces available to buy.You take a photo of your space, then virtually position the artwork in the place you think you want to see it. It’s inexpensive, low risk way to bring new beauty into home or workspace. And it’s a boon to emerging artists.
Illustration: Courtesy of Intomobile. Haptic Shoe Concept
Augmented reality is also bringing a beautiful change to people with sensory and mobility impairment, using haptic technology, or haptics, a tactile feedback technology. By applying forces, vibrations, or motions to the user, devices can offer mechanical stimulation which can enhance computer simulation, as well as the remote control of machines and devices (telerobotics).
The word haptic, from the Greek ἅπτικός (haptikos), means pertaining to the sense of touch and comes from the Greek verb ἅπτεσθαι haptesthai, meaning to contact or to touch.
Check out these haptic shoes, which enable a blind person to walk anywhere, without a cane or a seeing eye dog. This video shows haptic shoes, called “La Chal” created by TED Fellow Anthony Dipin Vas, which use GPS technology and vibrations to let their wearers know when to turn, lift their feet, and stop to avoid a hazard. (Read a Q&A with Vipin Das on the TED Blog.)
Video: Courtesy Ducere Technologies
Read about the beauty of Change all this week, as it relates to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact, including New Messages are Changing Worlds and How to Change Your Life & World.
Get busy and enter the BN Competitions, Our theme this week is Beautiful Change. Send in your images and ideas. Deadline is 9.29.13.
