Future Vision - From the mind of Robert Rice. There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything…” - Alan Kay The Past The concept of Augmented Reality has been around for a very long time, and not just in fiction. I’m not going to spend much time talking about what augmented reality (“AR)” is or should be, you can do that on your own. The Present Augmented Reality is quickly becoming one of the buzzwords of 2009 mostly due to social networking, blogs, twitter, and early exposure in mass media. For now, AR is mostly about superimposing graphics on a video stream (from a webcam). In most of these cases, this type of AR is pretty novelty and fairly useless. Probably the most well known example of level 2 is Mobilizy’s Wikitude-AR for the Android platform.
The Future Level 3 becomes Augmented Vision. Imagine… The Distant Future Back to the Future. Augmented Reality & The Web: Present and Future Scenarios. Augmented Reality (AR) is when virtual graphics and/or data are overlaid onto real world objects.
Many of you have seen this portrayed in movies such as Minority Report and The Matrix. It still seems a bit far fetched in 2009, yet there are apps that are beginning to make it a reality. One is Wikitude, an Android mobile app that mixes location imagery with information from Wikipedia. We first noticed it back in May 2008, when it was announced as one of the winners of the Android Developer Challenge. Wikitude is described on its website as "a mobile travel guide for the Android platform based on location-based Wikipedia and Qype content.
" (via Latitude's FriendFeed page) Wikitude represents perhaps the first stage of what is possible with AR. (via Literanista) Microsoft's Surface app, released in May 2007, is a pointer to this future. There are many potential scenarios for AR. Another interesting consideration is that social software will have a big role to play in future AR apps. Using the Ubiquity Firefox extension to create Drupal nodes. The Ubiquity extension for Firefox is an awesome tool that allows you to download user created mashups to do some really cool things in your browser. The video below shows the power of what it can do. It was introduced in August this year and there are already quite a few user created commands, including this one by Nils Werner, which will pre-populate a blog entry with the selected text on a web page. The only problem is that is requires your blogging engine to accept text via the GET parameters, which Drupal doesn’t do by default.
No problem, just install the Prepoluate module and away you go. Here are some step by step instructions on how to set it up. Install the Ubiquity Firefox extension. It’s pretty simple and makes it much quicker to jot down ideas for your blog while surfing the net. Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google (MT Hacks) During the past few weeks, there has been a lot of discussion about whether Twitter's "real time search" could pose a threat to Google.
While I am not sure if Twitter poses a threat to Google, I think it is clear that real-time search is increasingly important. And you can be sure that Google knows it. Will Google try to acquire Twitter, or take some other approach? Time will tell, but rather that wait, I decided to get realtime twitter search results on Google today. I created a Greasemonkey user script that does exactly this. I have been using it for a few days now and I think it really adds some freshness to Google search results pages.