Living in an Augmented Reality

This is more like VR than AR, but worth looking at none-the-less.  

A student of mine just sent me a link to this, and I must say it’s awesome.   The story is fairly simple, as the comments point out, but the visuals and the conception are really really wonderful.  This is what SecondLife will be someday, perhaps?  

This videos are pretty slick.  While it might be possible to nitpic on some of them, as a whole they are very cool and compelling.  There seems to be the Surface group’s “fingerprints” all over them (lots of them appear to be Surface in different form factors), and some of it is a bit implausible, but over all it’s cool to really see what a lot of our ideas might look like.  After all, form factor is important, and its often hard to imagine what something would be like in practice when the current implementation is so far from reality.

I particularly like the small interactive cards (yes, not really AR) and the various AR (both the tablet sized ones and the one or two HMD-based ones).

Here are some links:

http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=2715 

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090228/microsoft-office-labs-vision-2019-video/