WHEN REALITY IS NOT “REAL” ENOUGH

An article in today’s New York Times entitled “Kicking Reality Up a Notch” describes technology that overlay the real world with additional information.

A COMMON EXAMPLE

Watch an NFL football game on television and you routinely see things that are not there. (No, the Author is not talking about Bret Favre’s integrity). No, it is the line that crosses the field that indicates where the first-down indicator is located.

The technology, developed by Sportvision and called 1st and Ten, is an early commercial example of a field of computer science called augmented reality, in which the real world is overlaid with virtual information. Once the stuff of science fiction, augmented reality is now also making its way to smartphones, thanks to advances in both hardware and software.

USE YOUR CELL PHONE INSTEAD OF FODORS.

People in Amsterdam who download a free application called Layar on their cellphones can look through the camera and see information about nearby restaurants, A.T.M.’s, and available jobs displayed in front of buildings that house them. This information is provided by companies like Hyves, the Dutch social networking site, and ING, the financial services company. The businesses pay a fee to SPRXmobile, the privately held company based in Amsterdam that developed Layar.

Layar is available in the Netherlands for phones running on the Android operating system developed by Google. Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, a co-founder of SPRXmobile, says it will be marketed later this year in the United States, Germany and Britain.
A similar product for Android phones, called Wikitude.me, provides information on 800,000 points of interest around the world, according to Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis, founder of Mobilizy, the Austrian company that developed Wikitude.me. Much of this content comes from Wikipedia, he said.

TAKE TWO ASPRIN AND THE MACHINE WILL SHOW ME WHERE IT HURTS.

It is predicted that healthcare would benefit from such technologies.
Augmented reality will “reinvent” many industries, including health care and training, Mr. Inbar predicted. Already, researchers at the Technical University of Munich are looking at ways to display X-ray and ultrasound readings directly on a patient’s body. A research project at BMW is exploring how an augmented-reality view under the hood might help auto mechanics with diagnostic and repair work.

The Author is a bit resistant to such technologies. He has trouble with just plain reality, so augmented reality might be a bit flummoxing.

REALITY IS JUST ANOTHER CONSTRUCT IN THE DESERT OF THE REAL!