Augmented reality (wikipedia) has, for the most part, been relegated to the world of academics and researchers, resulting in interesting (but dubiously practical) demos like this or this funny video of a dog playing augmented reality soccer. Wee!
This week Google made 2 separate announcements that, when looked at together, lay out an almost too obvious path to realizing augmented reality at a consumer (and dare I say, practical) level.
The consensus showstopper at Google’s Android event this week was the built-in compass functionality that enables the phone to act as a lens on Google’s street view. Be sure to check out the story and the video here to see what I mean. It’s one of those things you have to see in action, spatially, to really get it.
Also this week, Google added an admittedly tantalizing (for those that have a soft spot for all things geo-locative) “More…” button to Google Maps with two choices: Photos and Wikipedia entries. Toggling these on and off will overlay user-uploaded photos and wikipedia entries that are tagged with location data on the map you’re looking at. Also, these two choices are clearly only the beginning.
So… after you see both of these in action, it’s really easy to imagine how Android will allow you to orient yourself with the compass on a street view of a map and give you those same toggles to look at buildings/spaces/etc. around you and see photos that people have taken in that place or historical information about the neighborhood.
Really, really cool, eh?
ps: On a side note, I’m not at all enthused by the fact that, for the photos, Google’s asking you to use yet another piece of software, Panoramio (I already don’t think I know anyone who uses Picasa), so I don’t feel compelled to contribute until they open it up a bit.
Excellent observation. The dataset used for the street view could easily be any number of other things:
* A virtual world or alternate dimension, existing parallel to our own in the same space
* As you suggest, insights into the objects and buildings in the space around us.
* A view of the same location days, months, or years ago.
Now think of this in reverse, as a data-capture device. With the compass and accelerometers one can stand somewhere and take a few dozen photographs and the system could easily stitch them together to form a 360-degree image from a specific point at a specific time. Imagine taking such a picture of your apartment, then accessing that picture a few days later to acheive the same VR effect where the alternate world is simply your room from a few days ago.
Good call.
[...] phone-as-compass demos, paired with the addition of geo-located wikipedia entries to Google Maps would usher in the era of consumer-grade augmented reality. This morning I came across this video by a company called Enkin doing just that. This is their [...]