Lots of things happened while I was gone. While catching up on the latest AR news from the past couple weeks, one word kept coming up over and over again.
BEYOND
I think “beyond” and belief are closely connected: beyond implies belief in the existence of *something* outside a perceived boundary. When there are multiple pieces of evidence of things existing in this “beyond”, belief solidifies and is reinforced by our experience. Augmented Reality by nature is dependent on “beyond” and belief — it’s what makes magic, it’s what seduces, it’s a promise of some payload (information or other). When augmented reality is a window to this “beyond”, what could solidify the belief that something is there more than the ability to have multiple synchronous windows?
I really like this idea. It’s saying loudly and clearly “The data is here! The objects are really here! You don’t believe me? Take a look at all these other windows!”
“Beyond” is a driving force; a siren. The data we cannot see creates a new Manifest Destiny calling us to stretch our territory from the real into seemingly uncharted augmented land… an untapped source of some awesome potential.
Well? Maybe it’s not that exciting. The augmented land so far *is* charted, carefully crafted to maximize its utility, maximize brand loyalty, maximize tourist information, or maximize my social media presence. Even so, I like where this is going. To infinity… and beyond!
First thing I pulled from my fishing nets this morning was a nice matome/roundup of computer vision demos on Youtube which included a demo for “BriefCam”. The narration was a bit painful to go through, but the demo itself was impressive. BriefCam indexes, summarizes, and compresses events in video logs from surveillance cameras in a way I can’t quite explain ((maybe that’s why the narration was in staccato)), and most certainly sparked my imagination in terms of the future of computer vision capabilities in augmented reality environments — particularly the possibilities of compressing perception of time.
I’m not sure when exactly this page was put up (last-modified date is in October), but this is the first time I’ve come across this page from Fujitsu Japan’s website. In the about section of their site, Fujitsu overviews several design concepts and areas of research they intend to cover for the year. 2009 was the AR-heavy “New Generation Experience” proposal which consists of 3 topics of research, 5 key concepts, and 20 sample scenarios. I’m sad to say I didn’t catch this before, because they put a lot of effort into slick diagrams I would have loved to see about 6 months ago. The research topics are pretty broad, bland, and what you would expect of any consumer electronics company, but the key concepts and scenarios are pretty fun. Let’s dive straight in, shall we? (I don’t see any English version of this page so I will do my best and translate and summarize.)
