Pixels from the Edge

People we gotta come up with a new name for augmented reality. That’s the real next big thing and it’s waaaay dope but it’s name has been hijacked by a flash technology called Papervision3D which has nothing more going for it than a first encounter gimmick factor (I’m not ripping on the papervision technology itself, just when it is used to implement AR). It’s not like I didn’t also fall pray to the sweet song of the papervision sirens myself during my odyssey towards a new digital reality. But papervision is wicked, tricksy, false. Because of it I feel like I’m already sick of AR and it doesn’t even really exist yet, at least it only exists in my mind and in cool video demos out on the web. But listen up folks that technology is not AR. The real augmented reality is mixing the digital realm with the real world, digitally enhancing what we see, and it’s seriously rad. Think back to the original Terminator movie when you’d see the world through Arnie’s eyes as he’s scanning the room and all kinds of information is digitally overlaid – he’d look at someone and a panel would appear next to them with information on height, weight, threat level, etc. – y’know the kinds of things a terminator needs to know.

Here’s what I’m talking about. The following video has been going around recently and is quite interesting:

It’s mixing AR with Twitter. It’s a sweet concept and as Twitter already geotags your tweets you’d think those tweets would appear digitally in the same spot where they were published. But it doesn’t necessarily seem to working that way, there’s no sound so I can’t figure out what’s really going on, but it appears that ghosts are tweeting from halfway up trees? Not to worry though it’s the thought that counts, just think about sitting in a bar and looking across the room and seeing the crowds tweets in speech bubbles above their heads. Neat huh?

I came across this guy earlier this week and he’s been giving me inspiration:

It’s Mr super sneaky invisible stealth dude. And I really like the fact that his art is analogue and yet it’s helped me to trigger a digital concept. It’s basically to combine the above AR Twitter app with TwitPic. So you’re walking through London and you see before you a huge collage of photos perfectly placed in their exact locations, sometimes even overlapping, the compass and gyroscope in our mobile devices enables the photo to appear in its exact location, angle, and dimensions. And with a city that big it probably wouldn’t be long until everything you see before you has completely become the alternative reality created by the Twittersphere, maybe transparently overlaying the actual reality. Yeah it’s kind of a cool idea but it’s a bit messy. But what happens if we throw in an extra dimension, that of time, the time of day to be exact? Now the photo will only appear at the exact time of the day it was taken, hang around for a few moments, then disappear. Imagine it, you stand there and watch a busy London street, Leicester Square even, and as you do photos fade in for a moment then vanish, hundreds of photos come and go every second, the ghosts of days and years long past are alive again for a brief moment every new day, forever changing our perception of reality and the very idea of space and time. Trippy.

Actually thinking about it this is probably something else I came across recently that greatly contributed to the inspiration for this idea.

So c’mon folks help me out, we gotta come up with a new name for this technology as the current term has already been killed by inferior technologies falsely claiming to be it. Maybe like ‘Super Vision’ or something, anything that’s different. Let’s just come up with a new name already so we can talk about it without throwing up in our mouths a little, so we can be really excited about this technology again.