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.