Augmented Reality

I was listening to a presentation the other day by a Futurologist. He talked about lots of things – the future of gadgets, smart badges, connecting artificial limbs to the nervous system and so on, but the thing that caught my imagination the most was the notion of ‘augmented reality’. We now have computer displays on spectacles, and displays on contact lenses are not that far away. And everything will have ‘presence’, so it seems it’s not going to be long before we are able to walk down the street and everything we see could be virtually tagged with information in our in vision display. The opening time of shops, special offers targeted especially at you – because the machine will know who you are, what’s playing in the theatre you’re passing and what seats are available, what number that bus in the distance is, where it’s going and if there is room. In fact, anything you could possibly want to know about anything you in your line of vision or around the corner could become available. But how will we manage it? We already suffer from information overload which has driven us to consume content in smaller bites, so do we really need this extra information? Of course, there are many specific applications for this technology – guided surgery, architecture, military and so on – and these will be very welcome, however, I think we’ll end up being very selective about how and when we switch these things on.