8/9/2019 better than reality.pdf
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8 A UG M EN TE D REALITYTECHNOLOGY
Goo gle's Glass project
i s
synonymous with
augmented
reality;
but the technology
is
already
part of eve ryda y life for many pe op le. By
Chris Edwards
T H A N
R E A
T Y ?
i A STORY TOLDby Georgia Institute of
i T echnologyassociate professor T h a d
i Starner, nowthetechnicallead onGoogle's
i Glass projectto buildaheadsettomake
iaugmented real i ty mainstream, i l lustrates
:both the advantagesan d potential
; social problem s for the technology.
i WhileStarne r was atthe M assachuset ts
I Institute ofTechnology(MIT),a student
; friend wentto thetopof the G reatDomethat
;overlooks the camp us along thenorth bank
i of th eCha rles River. Once atthe top, he found
;h ecould not getbackinto the elevator
because it had descendedto thegroundfloor.
IH edecidedhis best betw asto send an em ail
; to a fellow s tude nt inthe ir lab to askthem to
Star ner said at the time that the exotic
headgea r and ar mw are needed was, socially,
"a great icebreaker". But for mass-m arket
acceptance, looking like an extra from a later
serie s of 'S tar T rek ' is probably not going to
work even
if
it could at some point be
fleetingly fashionable.
ashion conscious
Google has made the Glass product steadily
more acceptable, stripping a headset down
to an unobtrusive pair of spectacles. T hose
who have tried the Glass report how it
ma kes them feel self-conscious in public but
so many times we have seen utility t rum p
other problems for example, it makes
Some once openly flaunted cellular phone
with batteries the size of a brick in image
that seem ridiculous to us
n o w .
It does not
seem to be a massive step to make and the
$1,500 target price tag could, as w ith so m a
other electronic devices, come down quick
Projects su ch as Glass, however, mask t
fact that augmented reality is already her
and tha t 's it not just about giving everyon
personal head-up display.
A mba rish M itra, CEO and co-founder o
Blippar points out augmented reality ha s
been on our
T V
scree ns for sometime:"W
the Gary Linekers of the world point and
draw ar oun d players on a football field."
Most museum visitors will have
8/9/2019 better than reality.pdf
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Google's Project Glass
integrates augmented reality
with wearable tech
RESEARCH
UNDERSTANDING AR
Camb ridge-based Aurasm a aims to go
ibits at a
t TED Talk event. When the screen of
hone was pointed at a paint ing of poet
rns it showed the image begin to
back groun d of bagpipes,
t to recite one of h is works. As the ph one
the image of the moving pain ting
Head of pa rtn ersh ips M att Mills says the
e in
d it with the video,
ting and til t ing in the same way the
ifthe Aurasm a software w ere
camera-resolution intensive, i t 's very
mem ory intensive. But several macro factors
are moving in favour of au gmen ted reality.
We
have better, sm arter mobile phones,
bet ter cameras and bet ter con nect ivi ty
Aurasma's and Blippar's software
run s on the processors inside one
of today's phon es. The thing that 's
incredible about this is how advanced
these devices have become, says Mills .
Beyond marketing
Laurent JuUiard, director of solutions and
software services at French sta rtup Kalray,
believes processing has togofurther to
make augmented real i ty bet ter than the real
Forhis seminal work, 'Understanding
Media', Canadian research er Marshall
McLuhan ana lysed the story of Narcissus
in the context of the rise of technolog y.
McLuhan argu ed thatthe storyiswidely
misunderstood
it s
not a tale of self love
but of the way in which fascination can
lead p eop le to withdraw from the real
world.
McLuhan argue d that the exte nsio n of
ourselves through technolog y can lead
to a numbn ess of our conventional
senses our attention is wholly en ga ge d
by what the technology delivers.Ina
2011 studyatthe Op en University in
Heerlen,The Netherlands, that sought to
find how well augm ented reality worked
for fieldwork resea rch, the researc hers
found a similar effect.The syst em
emu lated the typical augm ented-reality
sma rtphone app in which information is
overlaid on the sce ne re corded by the
camera.
StefaanTernier and colleagues
reported: We found that the way u sers
perceived the gam e environment
relates to tunnel vision. The player s
were discovering their surroundings
by mea ns of the smartphone cam era.
Holding the sma rtphone in front of
their eyes like spectac les they cou ld
gazeatthe virtual artifacts.
The problem wa s the experim ent
was meant to encourage the students
to explore their environment using
the phon es simply to help them not
be co m e the portal through which
they lookedateverything.Totrytog et
