Augmented Reality: Enhanced Perception

Webratta writes: "Can you imagine wearing glasses or goggles that, when looking at a person, a built-in display would tell you everything you wanted to know about that person? According to an article in Popular Science the day of cyborg-like enhanced perception could be closer than we imagined. Just imagine the privacy concerns stemming from this..."

Privacy issues - not necessarily

[nakhla]

The privacy concerns depend on where the information comes from. If it comes from a centralized database, then yes. But, if the user (the owner of the goggles) chooses the information to assign to a person then there aren't any big concerns. For instance, I could choose to display their name, birthday, wedding anniversary, and their favorite restaurant. It would be information that I already know, this would just allow me to access it more readily. In a way, it would act like a face-recognizing entry in my PDA, brining up all of the information I've already collected about that person.

Oh joy. Yet another form of advertising.

[Colin Smith]

You *know* that one of the first things that they'll do if this stuff ever becomes popular is to sell virtual advertising space. Adverts won't just be static billboards. They'll jump out at you.

a deepness in the sky

[patmfitz]

A well-realized use of this technology was presented in the book "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. Of course the technology was such that people didn't have to wear external hardware to take advantage of it.

One of the more interesting uses was allowing someone else to temporarily take control of your display - no more damn powerpoint slides at meetings!

And imagine the military uses - targeting computers built into your field of vision, zoom in with enhanced vision, etc.

New Scientist Article

[jsmyth]

Reminded me of HUD technologies (with AWACS support), where when a plane's radar picks up another plane, the HUD shows its location with a square, and various other information appears, generated from the AWACS feed, or other embedded signals in the radar (for friend/foe recognition etc.)

There's an interesting article in New Scientist about similar technology, used to "supplement" what your eyes can see. A guy from the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Rostock has come up with a "Virtual Showcase" that has the target artefact in, and then with the aid of special goggles the wearer sees a superimposed image, with a likely representation of what the artefact may have looked like originally.

You can find the link here [newscientist.com]
(http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/tech/arti cl e.jsp?id=99991959&sub=Hot%20Stories)

Have you heard of Steve Mann?

[fireboy1919]

He's almost completely the father of wearable computing. He wore a pair of glasses and a "keyboard" interface everywhere he goes, and worked for MIT media lab. People who have met him say he seemed more intelligent than he actually is, because his vision sensors send information back to the lab which he can route to others for aid in identification, and he asked questions on the LAN IRC (I don't think they actually use that protocol) and got the answers from the minds of MIT. Its as though he can answer any question.

His page is at the University of Toronto [toronto.edu] now, and those glasses he's wearing are exactly the ones that I mentioned - at least, they're the fourth draft of the ones I mentioned.

Car HUD

[mattbelcher]

Motorists could put these things to especially good use. A Heads-up display like in fighter planes could point out road hazards and relative vehicle speeds. Instead of a rear-view mirror, a semi-transparent projection of the view from the rear could be called up with a little press on the steering wheel. In conditions of low-visibility, the HUD could enhance the lane dividing lines and point out other traffic indicators. Of course, maybe we'll just have cars that drive themselves before we get that far.

Already in use.

[TheConfusedOne]

Boeing has been using augmented reality for some time now to help the people who are wiring up the new airplanes. The glasses project the relevant portion of the wiring diagram over the section that the worker is looking at.

All of the various privacy concerns are unfounded at the moment. The large challenge with any AR system is to figure out what you're looking at. For it to work with people you would either need some kind of facial recognition system built-in or the person would have to be willingly broadcasting a location AND identity signal to be used by such a system.

Personally, I think the best Sci Fi example of this stuff is in California Vodoo Game. In this case Niven and Barnes used AR to deal with the fact that the previously expected Star Trek hologram technology hasn't been able to catch up to "reality" yet. The neat thing about that was that you had the combination of AR and MMORPG technology blended together to make LARP'ing really fun. (If you couldn't decipher all of those acronyms than you probably wouldn't be interested anyway.)

Gaming Interface for Ease of Use

[Alien54]

Part of what makes the mind so efficient is the filtering process. So at some point, you would have a filter so that to do not get overwhelmed with data.

I Imagine that the interface would have to be something familiar that most geeks can deal with.

I suggest a gaming interface like Doom [unm.edu]. There was that admin tool for killing off zombie processes. Something similar could be used to symbolically represent the people you meet. Bill Gates As Satan, for Example.

Of course, you would have different patches depending on your tastes and opinions.

Re:Instructions

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah. I've had over 40 women at last count. Your stereotypes are only funny to those losers who need some reassurance that it's OK that they don't get laid because they are geeks, and geeks "never get laid."

Another use for it

[42forty-two42]

When you're walking down the street, an arrow shows you how to get to your destination. No need to pull out your PDA when you get lost! It could also be a way to do 3d videoconferencing...

Or the complete opposite

[JohnAsh]

From the article:

Although Mann's wearable computer system provides reams of data when he asks for it, it can also block the world out with what Mann calls "diminished reality." This AR software can replace billboards, street signs, and ads on buses with stored digital images of waterfalls and other natural scenes.

We might get an escalation of the spyware-adblocker war.

Sensors for non-visible spectrum

[kryzx]

There's no mention of what I consider to be the most interesting possibility: the ability to "see" the non-visible parts of the spectrum. With something like this you could have sensors to detect infrared, ultraviolet, microwave, etc., and display it as an overlay. Depending on what you were doing you could adjust what parts of the spectrum were shown in your display. That would so totally rock. I can think of tons of uses for it, and technically is seems more feasible than most of the apps described in the article.

Next is Super/Extra/Limited Sensory Perception

[WeeGadget]

Overlaying information from DBs onto our field-of-awareness is fascinating. Also useful would be Enhanced Sensory Perception. Devices exist for this already, but they have not been fused into a single field-of-awareness device. Some categories of Enhanced Sensory Perception are :

• Super Sensory : Our current senses are extended to sense lower intensities and wider spectrum. e.g. Hear faint conversations, sounds too high or low in frequency. See faint things, see infra-red, utraviolet, etc. Smell faint traces, smell chemicals beyond our current detection.
• Extra Sensory :Sense information that is alien to our sensory system. e.g. Sense UWB Radio to "see" through walls and into the ground. Sense magnetism.
• Limited Sensing : Cap the intensity of sensory input, to prevent the "stun", and temporary loss of perception effects of extreme intensity inputs. e.g. Reduce the intensity of loud bangs and bright flashes. Another critical goal of limited sensing is to prevent sensory overload. Sensory overload is easily reached when fusing Enhanced Sensory Perception and Information from DBs into our field-of-awareness. The system must attempt to limit this augmentation to areas that represent danger, are of known interest to us personally, or are in our current focus area. e.g. Do we want to hear every faint sound ? ... or just the voice of a distant person we are looking at? Do we want to see the IR signature of everything? ... or just when it would enhance our perception of danger, interest, or current focus? Selectivly limiting and hilighting sensory input is the make-or-break job of a usable Augmented Reality Device.

Jono

Boeing...

[cr0sh]

IIRC, Boeing used (or tried out) an AR system several years back for the purpose of wiring the electrical systems of their planes. The wiring harnesses in the planes consist of several miles of wiring - all over the place.

From what I understood, the idea was to get the tech to the point where a worker could simply look at the connection points, and the AR system would show what wires went where, via an overlay. I suppose some kind of tracking system would have been needed, to position the overlay properly (and from what I have been following lately, that problem is still unsolved in general AR/VR applications - but getting there rapidly). The whole idea was to eliminate the need for a worker to stop what he is doing, exit the frame, pick up the book of diagrams, leaf through them, and figure out what goes where "abstractly". With such an AR system, production and install times would be lowered - I am sure it could be applied to a number of other areas as well (including repair after the plane is built).

Not sure where they went with it - if it was a limited trial, how well it worked, whether the equipment was up to task (I tend to think it wasn't), how workers liked it, etc. By the lack of talk on it, I tend to think it wasn't too successful - but the idea gives an example of what really can be done with AR.

What is funny about all of this is that the first "real" VR style system (ie, the "Sword of Damaecles" (sp) by Ivan Sutherland in the late 1960's) was an AR system, complete with see-through optics and "wire-frame" virtual objects...