Augmented Reality and other (postponed) futures…
- November 30th, 2009
- By rahulsen79
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Dont 6th Sense on my wall...
I believe in the concept of ubiquitous computing, as advocated by Adam Greenfield and many like-minded thinkers.
I believe that is the direction our future should take.
Honestly, I’ve done a project recently that uses urban and spatial elements and embedded computing to demonstrate a possible future. You touch a wall, and information appears. You move elsewhere, go home, and access that same data from your table surface. It’s all about moving away from the archetype of the desktop computer and disseminating the computer chip into many smaller ones that embed themselves in our clothes, our walls, homes and cities.
So I am partly shooting myself in the foot with this post. I want to rant about the frequent desire we have to project an augmented reality on our environments. Enough already! There has been a lot of talk in recent times about Pranav Mistry’s 6th Sense project. While I marvel at the genius of Pranav, and the sheer goodness of his intention – I politely and humbly refuse to believe that augmented reality is the way ahead. Wearing helmets to project our erstwhile computers onto walls so that our taped fingers can manipulate data on them, is not in my opinion, the dream for the future I had in mind. Pranav Mistry has clearly prototyped a way that could make augmented reality actually feasible – but I would shudder to think of a world where such a concept was commonplace.
So let me state again for the record – AUGMENTED REALITY IS NOT THE WAY AHEAD.
It is a dream for a future that we’ve had for a while now. We need to get over it, and think beyond.
Another postponed future...
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