The state of Augmented Reality

[andrewducker]

Five years ago I had a disagreement with a friend over whether this article was being overly pessimistic about augmented reality and whether we'd have "hard" AR soon.

Five years later, and this is the state of the art:

Watch on YouTube

Which is, I totally admit, a very neat tech demo. But it's not "there" yet. The FOV is too small, and you can see the real world through it. Although, to be fair, most of the time the real world isn't _that_ distracting, you're definitely not going to be able to "see Victorian gas lamps in place of normal lights" or "have a real Coke can that you want to turn into an AR Pepsi can by drawing a Pepsi logo over the Coke logo".

Ah well, I'll make a note to come back in five years time and see where we are then!

Comments

[movingfinger]

Yikes. I would hurt myself a lot with this technology, and probably break things around me.

[heron61]

I entirely agree. I expect to see widescreen (most of your field of view) soft AR fairly soon (almost certainly within 5 years). That can provide you with virtual name-tags (I'd love this at gaming cons), allow people to provide preferred pronouns and other biographical info, provide seamless navigation and everything from virtual graffiti to useful clickable tags in museums and on historic sites (as well as yet another forum for porn, nifty games, too many ads, and adblockers).

Non-realistic, and obviously imperfect virtual cosplay may also be possible, and could be quite fun. However, hard AR sounds like it would take a minimum of 15-20 years from now, and might require considerably longer. In fact, it doesn't sound impossible for hard AR to not work using anything short of direct neural interfaces.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, five years to HoloLens+ sounds entirely doable.

I'm looking forward to my neural implantts.

[heron61]

As I think about it, I can also see a way to do something like hard AR, but in practice quite cheesy - you need a VR headset with a camera and lidar, then you have it display a rendered version of what the camera sees, and add in AR elements. In short, instead of seeing what's in front of you, with the addition of somewhat cartoonish, poorly matted, jaggedly moving, and slightly out of place AR objects, everything you see would be cartoonish, poorly matted, jaggedly moving, and slightly out of place, but you could indeed make a city street look like a scene from the late 1800s (or more accurately, like a scene from a mid-range videogame with that setting).

I could see this being popular for AR games, and some people would undoubtedly wear them full time (and now I'm imagining a murder mystery where someone hacks a device of this type to display a fatally incorrect view of the world). Hmm, this may go in Trinity Contiuum: Aeon...

[birguslatro]

I was gobsmacked! Because somehow this was being shown to me...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f8xnaDIAow

If that was AR, I thought it was quite good! :)

[andrewducker]

Um. Wrong video, I think...

[andrewducker]

D'oh, sorry, that was your point!