Monday, July 13, 2009

Where's my Visor?

Though I suppose the Trekkers would insist that I call it a V.I.S.O.R....

I thought of this while reading the Sunday New York Times Bright Ideas article titled Kicking Reality Up A Notch, by Leslie Berlin, about a concept called Augmented Reality. Essentially, it's a method for infusing what you see (or hear, I would suppose) by using your normal tools -- glasses, binoculars, phone screen images -- with information from other sources. The article calls it "(T)he real world is overlaid with virtual information." Here's an illustration from the article, showing a display from a European system called Layar:
I'd like to say that it works through what an instructor of mine in radio school called FM (Fuckin' Magic), but the tools are almost pedestrian -- location-aware software coupled with geotagged information, and, in the future, possibly image-recogition software. Is it easy? Not for me, no, but these people surely do make it look that way.

Maybe it is FM!

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