[this is a sketch about how I see a couple of trends merging to the point where something very new is created]
We are going to hit a point of blurring. It’ll be great …
I’ve paid attention to Virtual Reality (mostly in the form of SecondLife, but a little exposure to X3D as well) for a few years now, and am about to jump into Augmented Reality …
But I can look ahead and see what’s really going to happen in a few years. We’re going to get a lot of mixed scenarios where it’s not so clear how to classify what happens on screen:
- Virtual Reality is about synthetic worlds, where content from the real world is brought in. A couple of examples I have personally worked on would be: bringing photos and video into SecondLife – sometimes static, sometimes live. I also have personally worked on objects for Vivaty that bring audio, video, and images from Flickr into a Virtual Space.
- Augmented Reality is about the Real World (as in realtime video), with data from the internet and local storage dynamically overlaid. The classic example is to take video with a smartphone, and dynamically overlay information for nearest subway stations. places to eat, and real estate listings.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality can be seen as the flip side of each other.
You start with the synthetic, and bring in the real / web. Or … you start with the real, and you bring in the web / synthetic.
For the time being, the worlds are largely going to stay that way. It takes a lot of processing power and a lot of code that doesnt readily exist at the moment to put the two modes together.
But I can see it — think the present boundaries are going to just stay put? :)
Blended Reality will give the ability to flow seamlessly between real video with synthetic overlays, to the scenario of completely immersive environments, back to straight live video.
Scenario: I walk to Central Park and pull out a decent sized tablet (jam 4 iphones together — That’s a good screen size to envision). I see live video, and overlays of points of interest. I may pick a point of interest (let’s say it’s winter, so we pick the ice rink). I get a feed in-scene of the latest photos / writeups of the ice rink, and I can segue into a virtual world recreation of it. I meet with friends who may be elsewhere, but who are enjoying the get-together in the virtual sense. From their point of view, perhaps they see live video of what’s happening at the ice rink. Maybe their friends in real life have a clickable visual tag floating on them from the viewer point of view (if the RL friends choose to make their location info available to some of their contacts) Perhaps some of the video comes from my tablet! The gist of this is, mixing modes based on location…
I’m just doing the flat-screen writeup of this for the time being. It’s enough of a start to envision stepping into and out of virtual and augmented spaces, whether on the go with some tablet, or behind a desk. Think not so much of overlapping hard window definitions, but of smooth transitions from between flat / augmented / virtual areas of the screen.
As I said, this is just a sketch — thoughts that have occurred to me in the last day. The basic idea is that I dont see the hard boundaries of Virtual and Augmented Realities staying put. They are going to blur and meet in the middle ;)
