Living in an Augmented Reality

As I sit in the ISMAR panel on “the future of AR”, I’m reminded of work I did with Rob Kooper (a former student in my lab) back around 2000, the final publication of which was here:

The idea behind the real-world wide web (admittedly, not a great name) is to create a wearable AR interface to the web;  the fundamental assumption on which it is based was that you could author and query information based on location, not just content.  In that work, we brought up a lot of issues that would need to be addressed to make such an interface work, to make it safe and to make authoring and query practical.

The world has changed a lot;  Web 2.0 has arrive;  mobile phones are powerful;  RSS feeds, user-generated content and social networking are concepts familiar to a large part of the digital society.  And now, the AR community is finally starting to turn toward this problem.

I am planning on doing some posts from ISMAR, to highlight what I think is cool.  First, of all, of course, is the city.  Cambridge is wonderful.

Nothing much else to post right now, except to suggest you head over to Games Alfresco, where Ori is covering the conference in depth.  Thanks Ori, it cuts down on what the rest of us need to type.

Well, I guess I’ll answer that question with “no.”   But, on the night before ISMAR starts here in Cambridge, England, I was sitting around with some fellow AR folk, having a pint and some fish and chips in The Eagle, and I let the unwashed iPhone-less masses indulge in Spore on my iPhone.

And it struck me as somehow appropriate that we were playing Spore in the Eagle Pub.   For those who don’t know,  the Eagle is the place where Francis Crick interrupted patrons’ lunchtime on 28 February 1953 to announce that he and James Watson had “discovered the secret of life” after they had come up with their proposal for the structure of DNA. 

Perhaps this is only amusing to those of us with jet lag.  Off to bed, then, and off to ISMAR tomorrow!

Next week is the annual ISMAR (International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality) Symposium, in Cambridge, England.  I’ll be heading there this weekend, and expect it to be the usual mix of tracking, applications, studies and demos.  It’ll be a lot of fun, and promises to show us all where the next generation of AR is headed.

I’ll be helping run a tutorial (on Handheld Augmented Reality), demoing a handheld AR game (Art of Defense, running on Nokia N95 phones), and watching my just-graduated student Cindy present a paper (An Evaluation of Graphical Context in Registered AR, Non-Registered AR, and Heads-Up Displays). 

See you all there!