Visions

Advancements in Augmented Reality

Technology being released soon include Microsoft's Holo Lens (Might be available from June 2015), Oculus Rift 3 (unknown), Magic Leap (rumors say 2016).

For Communication

Imagine if you could communicate with more than facial/body language and words/sounds? What about communication with colors? Emotionally colored speach f.ex. could help to let people understand things, that sometimes goes missing in translation. What if questions were yellow, discern or frustration was red, when you felt blue, well err, blue, friendly and nice was green, etc. And what if even whole field of vision could be slightly tinted by emotional states.

Imagine being together with someone and the lighting and how "reality" looked around you was transformed to have movie-like colorings, if you're into romantic, or action-movie, any sort of colorpalette could be achieved as a modification of actual visible input, through realtime filtering.

Shapes and curves could also be used as forms in communication, as f.ex. attributes facilitating accentuation and/or emotions.

For Health

If you have trouble feeling well in any given situation, not talking about clinical depression or such, but if you are in a very sad/unfortunate condition where you are, based on what you see around you, you could modulate that impression with augmented reality in many ways. Imagine if you could change colors on anything you want and the computer of your vision could remember the shapes you colored the way you wished, or if you feel a place is without much happening in it.

You could include all sorts of items and characters, and even modify whatever appeared in front of your eyes, you could have tons of fun f.ex. with an algorithm to make people walking around you into caricatures and even add behaviors to what they were doing based on recognition from actual events. You could have helpers in the form of drones, and kids could have their own protector / play-organizer / teacher drone which with vision can to the kid be seen as something less scary than a drone, maybe a flying ferry f.ex.

For more serious health issues like impaired movement, if you are in a wheelchair, you could get cues as to what places and in which direction you would be able to get from one point to another while in a wheelchair, also what places you could get help and by whom, which could be cues into your vision.

At health institutions a guide could even appear in augmented reality and interact with you to get you help and answer lots of common issues while you wait, and your thoughts could control it, or you could speak and lip-reading could be done by local measurements. Lots of ways this could be done, just imagining on the fly here.

For Education

We could have class-cooperation in sharing vision

For Work

Learning to use tools the correct way: To be able to see exactly how something would look before it is built, how to build it, where to do what and when.

Safety precautions: warnings and avoiding danger and hazards.  To be able to exclude people walking around a person if working in a tight environment with many co-workers, and also modulate auditory input to avoid disturbance (of course done by earphones or something, but it could be processed based on importance with AI and all sorts of things. Should be a separate post about what auditory signals one could gain control over by programmed hearing aid/reduction based on wish.

For people with concentration issues at work, one could modify the amount of noise in the work environment by both changing sound perception and visual perception, as to 

 

If you have trouble f.ex. spotting subtle, but important changes in any you could add a reactional mechanism to that sort of decoded input to alert a person, it could be

In Play & Entertainment

Harmless play can be achieved through the possibility to play with things that can not harm you or be destroyed.

Interactive Movies might deserve a separate post, as I've had dreams of being inside of movies (and knowing that was what they were) as part of a character, and you could f. ex. change character of a movie when you see someone interesting to "be" in it, and the plot could be a vague story outline, still with you being able to within some limit control it. Well this sounds a bit like eXistenZ, that movie if you've seen it, really weird stuff. But it could be done and something more fun than that perhaps.

Extended Vision

More to come here, it is definitely a new adventure into "seeing the world very differently, beyond what one could think possible before".

Small Scale Holographic Display

If one could think of a cellphone or similar device as one of our key control units as it might be today, one could think that having it capable of producing a bigger scale 3D display would in some cases be beneficial for more precise interaction and some exciting new ways of manipulating and creating, within all fields of human action and interaction. It would still be mediocre compared to a full blown AR experience where such would be more unnecessary, but it does have a revolutionizing usage potential.

We see Apple recently patented a display for holographic object display with interaction capabilities. And there could be many ideas for usage of such. I tried to envision more of a massive block display, will try include sketch in this article, but who knows what yet it will yield from Apple development with this patent.

Microsoft's Holo Lens and devices from other vendors are coming soon, here are some videos and links:

Avegant Glyph - website - Infographic Video from envisionit on Vimeo.

OSVR (Open Source Virtual Reality)

CastAR

Atheer AiR

NextVR

A list of 70 AR / VR devices can be found at Augmera.com

Epson Moverio BT-200 (Bluetooth Smart Glasses)

Kopin Develops Innovative NanoJet Process for Micro LCDs to Serve Emerging AR and VR Markets

Other mentionable references:

Almost like normal glasses: Shima from Laforge Optical

K-Glass AR Chip

Augmented Reality Fun And Games At The British Museum

KAIST developed an extremely low-powered, high-performance head-mounted display embedding an augmented reality chip

ODG Smart Glasses

Telepathy - Single Eye fashion-foldable AR

Magic Leap, overhyped!? Make magic leap augmented reality experience ..uncertainty around all this of course. 

Camera based on sound

What about a depth camera that operated based on sound? I hear people say reality is like vibration and that "everything is sound" so why not try. A lot is waveforms, and also I've read some can locate obstacles using clicking sounds, and dolphins can remember and tell which object is inside a closed box with the use of sound, so why not a depth camera sensor which can do something similar.

 

 

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