A pilot getting ready to land sees the flight paths of the aircraft around him laid out with clear precision.
A gamer walking through the streets of New York holds up his smartphone and fends off attacking aliens.
A sports fan, watching the big game at home can see every play drawn out in perfect clarity as the announcers analyze the game.
Welcome to the age of augmented reality, where almost any aspect of our lives can be enhanced with virtual information. Science fiction writers dreamed our world for decades. Now we're living to see it all come to fruition. Yet, so few people are aware of it happening, or even know what "augmented reality" is. You see it every Sunday during football season when the 1st and Ten line is displayed on your television sets. You see it when the GPS app on your phone shows you where you are in real-time with directions for where to go next laid out in front of you. You see it when you hold up the same phone's camera to look at a landmark in a foreign country and see information about the landmark displayed for them to read.
Yep. All of that is augmented reality. And, it's been around longer than you think. The first AR simulator was invented in 1962 by a man who was not a scientist. His name was Morton Heilig, and he was a cinematographer determined to create the "movie of the future". His invention, the Sensorama used 3D technology and could give a viewer the sight, sound, feel, and even smell of riding a motorcycle through the streets of Brooklyn. Pretty impressive. Unfortunately it was also incredibly expensive to make films for the contraption, and so the idea was laid to rest.
Fast forward to 1992, when L.B Rosenburg developed Virtual Fixtures, a functioning AR system at the US Air Force Research Laboratory and demonstrates the benefits AR can have on human performance. Of course the military saw the benefits of the technology right away. They now use AR in a variety of ways, most recently ARMAR, a head-up display designed to help military mechanics in making repairs.
These days anyone with an iPhone has access to a myriad of AR apps right at their fingertips. Even more notable is that we now may have the first true AR gaming system on our hands. This year Nintendo's 3DS system shipped with 6 AR cards included that will allow users to interact with virtual objects that appear in reality as shown by the system's camera.
Still don't think that AR is a big deal? Check out the most recent advertising campaign taking place in London's Victoria Station right now:
So, what's next for science fiction writers? With their dreams becoming reality every day, how are they going to push the envelope even farther? I don't know, but I personally can't wait to find out.
