So I decided to clean out my Android this morning. Among the various broken/no longer supported apps I removed, I also removed numerous game apps for one reason or another. This got me to thinking, how much are we really using the technology that we all carry around in our pocket. We literally have the entire knowledge of the internet just a few finger swipes away, but we still sit around and argue who is right when all it takes is a quit check of the ye olde worldwide web. I’m going to hold back on letting this falling into a McLuhanian discussion about the medium being the message and that the technology is an extension of our senses. The argument has been made, it works on a few levels, but honestly looking the technology can be so much more, namely augmented reality integration.
Ok, I’ll give the nay-sayers time to run and hide under the proverbial rock of yester-year. Augmented reality always seems to get at least one person in a crowd panicking about either crazed robot overlord or surrogate bodies that will leave the population wired only to technology and not to people (there is a move about this and I do not feel like searching IMDB for it right now). At the bottom of this rant I’ve attached two links to other blogs that give a rough idea of some concepts that really strike at the idea of augmented reality. The first deals with integration of visual technology into current smart-phone style tech, creating things like virtual grocery stores anywhere allowing application users to select and purchase groceries and merely pick them up at the actual venue at a later time (think Minority Report). The second on deals with using smart phones in museums and other educational institutions to put the information direct in the user’s hand rather than in pithy wall mounted boards, which are very limited in the information they can provide (think of it as a museums integrated with Wikipedia). Thoughts?
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