Augmented reality still has the aura to it of a far-future technology, something eternally five, ten, even twenty years away. But the truth is that we have the tech right now. I'm sure you've all seen GE's fun augmented reality demonstration. Or maybe Hidden Park. Or how about Kweekies? That's just a trickle compared to the flood we'll be seeing by this time next year.
AR hasn't taken the center stage yet, to be sure; but since it's inevitably coming, this means we're in for this decade's biggest and most significant format war. Forget HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray; who cares about dead media when digital distribution is the future anyway? No, the next big format war is one of platform, and has more in common with Xbox vs. PlayStation, or Mac vs. Windows.
A cabal of high-profile AR developers and researchers have come together to fire the first big shot across the bow in this looming battle. They've written an open letter to Apple asking the company to open up the iPhone SDK to provide developers with a public API to manipulate live video in real time. This is a crucial tool that would make the iPhone a powerhouse for mobile augmented reality applications. If you can't access live video, the device just can't access reality in order to augment it, so to speak.
I don't know if Apple will do it; they're a company that take their walled gardens very seriously. But hey, Apple, I think it would be a foolish business move not to. Developers are on your doorstep begging for the chance to make your device the go-to platform for mobile computing -- and you can give it to them now, not five years from now. How can you possibly turn that down?
Apple does not want to open up the video end of the iPhone because they want to limit you to Apple video formats. They sell video -- LOTS OF VIDEO -- and they do not want people like me to download .avi files from usenet or wherever and just be able to play them on the iPhone. This is very foolish and cripples the desirability of the device beyond Augmented Reality to encompass massive existing uses of content not purchased directly from Apple. It all feels so . . . Microsoft.
Posted by: Jim Gramze | July 02, 2009 at 12:53
Augmented reality is nothing new - the heads-up display is a fairly common version of AR.
Not to mention it's also been used for games (most notably ARQuake, although I believe there was also an AR version of Pac-Man, and there's a game called AR Tower Defence for the Nokia N95).
However, seeing AR become a household tech . . . that would definitely be good to see.
(By the by, Mr. Gramze: I live by the mantra of "What Does It Do, How Well Does It Do It?" As such, I have never seen the point of buying a Panashiba/Applesoft/Mitsuyota/(insert portmanteau'd company name here) product - especially if I can get an off-brand product that does the same things as the name-brand product, with the same kind of quality, at a lower price.)
Posted by: Macavity | July 16, 2009 at 15:05