Augmented Reality
by BRITTA RICKER PETERS on November 15, 2009 • visualization: AR • COMMENTI’m very excited and honored to be a contributor to this blog now! Thank you Kumiko!
My first post will be about what I have been reading for my PhD research this week. Augmented reality (AR) and mobile gaming with ubiquitous devices! Doesn’t that make you want to jump up and down and run around in circles with excitement?
AR has been getting a lot of press lately. New apps such as Wikitude, Layar, and Yelp have all released apps with text based AR functionality for the iPhone and Android. AR and other forms of mix reality have been in the works and have been studied for over a decade, yet very few users have had the chance to interact with AR. How many of us received head mounted displays for Christmas when we were 12? AR has not been widely accessible. Now suddenly the device we used to call our loved one on to find out if there is milk in the fridge can also be used as a monocle to augment our reality by reading restaurant reviews while looking directly at the front door of the restaurant.
I started looking for links about mobile AR development to see how this stuff is built. When I started poking around on Google for development tips and tricks, I found more job postings for AR developer jobs than websites about how to actually develop an AR app. Crazy! That tells us that there is high demand for these types of applications but we know relatively little about how mobile AR applications help or hurt spatial cognition and decision making in the wild. We do know that AR is snazzy.
More to come regarding gaming with ubiquitous devices. Has anyone checked out Parallel kingdom? Thoughts?
