SixthSense Computing of Tomorrow is Augmented Reality I Want Today

layar

Although this video from TEDIndia was previously shared on our main GigaOm site last year, I’m very appreciative that one of our readers put it on our radar again. (Thanks, Dave!) If you haven’t seen it, I consider it a must-watch. Why? Because Pranav Mistry shows ingenious ways to meld the physical world and digital world using very intuitive methods. I look at this demonstration as showing the true promise of augmented reality, a concept that really hasn’t wowed me just yet. There’s potential in AR, of course, but the practicality of it is limited in my view.

The timing on this video is rather perfect, though. I was just wading through an in-depth report on mobile augmented reality over at GigaOm Pro (subscription required) and it highlights many of the challenges I see — and even some I hadn’t thought of. In the 35 page PDF report, John du Pre Gauntt discusses how location based systems and mobile hardware are poised to blur the lines of reality in the future. Given the maturity of smartphone hardware, John expects the number of AR-capable handsets to quadruple by 2012, so clearly there’s a potentially large user base. But what types of augmented reality add value while others simply act as fun eye-candy? That’s what I’m interested in and when I saw the TEDIndia video, it’s what I envision to be the potential future of AR — interactive computing without the computer in the way.

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