Technology is finally catching up with the dreams that many people have had in the field of Augmented Reality. Augmenting one’s reality literally means superimposing more sensory information onto a scene than there actually is. In it’s most basic of forms, listening to music on your iPod is augmenting reality, but it wasn’t until video services were added into the mix that things truly became interesting.
The market for head-mounted display devices is tiny; so small as to be completely nonexistent. Nobody really finds them to be useful for their purposes. Even the home cinema-audience, who normally buy every little thing there is to enjoy their movies, find that the implicit fashion statement is too large a trade-off to be able to watch Heroes on their iPhone while keeping the phone itself in the pocket while on the subway coming home from work.
Augmented reality, however, is where the true application for head-mounted displays can finally shine. Assuming that one makes the screen transparent enough to see through and still able to overlay graphical information, imagine the potential after watching this movie:
Finding subway-stations is only the first step. A head-mounted display connected to a small wearable computer would be able to help you navigate to an address, keep track of the bus schedule, look up telephone numbers, show you recent twitter messages from the people you’re following, alert you for any traffic jams you might end up in, all the way down to basic tasks like showing you the time and date. As the head-mounted display technology improves (and there are people working on contact lens displays!) and technology becomes even more portable (compare the size of the new iPhone 3G to what the equivalent needed only 5 years ago), I’m sure that we’re not far away from seeing some real applications of head-mounted displays soon enough.
But is the world ready for cyborgs wandering the streets?
