Goodbye, virtual environments. Hello, real environments.
by Tateru Nino 
Aug 12th 2008 at 1:00PM
Filed under: News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds
With all the talk about virtual environments (virtual world is, after all, something of a misnomer), what if you could use the real environment and bring the virtual to you? That's been the fundament of Augmented Reality for some time, and the core of many a spirited discussion -- the overlaying of information, images, representation onto what we perceive of the real world. Information about products, places, people, directions to destinations.
What about games? What if you could layer a gamespace into your physical environment? Or a non-game virtual environment, like Second Life, for example? The Escapist's Howard Wen talks to Blain MacIntyre, Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has been one of several researchers there hacking on the Second Life viewer, adding Augmented Reality features to the software.
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MacIntyre's team has worked with a number of different technologies and identifies a number of distinctive opportunities that come from the AR-ifying (if that's even a word) of systems like Second Life and even more challenges that must be overcome before it truly becomes feasible (Lag, for example, and heavyweight rendering).
Coupled with technologies like Kevin Alderman's low-cost motion-capture suit, or Kapor's 3D camera, there's a lot of potential for more active integration of the real and the virtual, to the benefit of both. Check out the interview. What do you think? Is this just a pipe-dream, or is there something genuinely compelling here for you, the user?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Angel said on 1:26PM 8-12-2008
Given my field of study, and taking into account specific and general advances in technology i have to say I do not believe this is a pipe dream. One must realize that these technologies are a first stab, not a final product. We will see AR come into being in the relatively near future, say in 7 to 10 years, with the sophistication and finesse such things will require for "the masses". I will go even as far to say in 10 to 15, definitely in 20, years AR will be a standard in human interaction but will not be attached to external devices. It will be integrated into our very bodies. (see The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzwiel).
As a close friend of mine says when I bring such things up: "that's science fiction" to which my response is "the Star Trek communicator was science fiction but look *pulls out his cell phone* I have one and it is a lot better than the fiction"...
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Loki said on 2:40PM 8-12-2008
is'nt AR-ifying Abuse Reporting?
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Cincia Singh said on 4:41PM 8-12-2008
I think integration of RL and SL is a nice idea. It's impossible to imagine the ways such a technology could be useful, and there are limitations beyond the rendering issue like having enough bandwidth available to a large enough interested audience to make such an endeavor practical from a business perspective. Also, merging SL and RL defeats the "immersion in fantasy' that attracts many people to a platform like SL; it's hard to maintain the fantasy while hooked up to an assortment of gear to be effective inworld.
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Opensource Obscure said on 9:52PM 8-12-2008
An alternate Second Life viewer offers selective visual muting, thereby blocking out ad farms and other visual annoyances - see Alternate Second Life Viewers
http://dantonsideways.blogspot.com/2008/06/alternate-second-life-viewers.html
Here is Jamais Cascio talking about selective visual muting in augmented reality...
http://www.openthefuture.com/2008/08/making_the_visible_invisible.html
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Dale Innis said on 11:10PM 8-12-2008
I can see this being useful in some smallish applications, but in general... not so much. (If I want to walk around in a huge virtual mansion, I need a huge actual thing to map it onto? I don't own that much RL land, sorry!)
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Ghen said on 1:42PM 8-13-2008
Personally I can't wait to have a HUD in real life. The ability to record my view, playback, snap pictures, put names and topics of conversations over peoples heads, label nearby fire hydrants so I don't park next to them, measure anything in real time length, width, distance, weight, etc...
The possibilities for real world augmentation are endless and I wish they were here right now. I'd be first in line at the become-a-cyborg store.
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Tateru Nino said on 3:01PM 8-13-2008
Wait... what? You're not one already, Ghen?
At the very least, you should gander at the available consumer HMDs, no? :)
Nightbird Glineux said on 8:54PM 8-14-2008
Umm, why does the application (i.e. the SecondLife client) have to host the AR? Why not just have a second application, like a web browser with the AR viewed on top, with an alpha channel (or magic pink, etc.) in its window? Wouldn't it be simpler to just hack Firefox once to allow transparent backgrounds?
Otherwise you're ultimately asking all applications to be modified to host ARs.
To answer Tateru's final question: "No." ;) But that's just me. I do things like turn off gadgets in OS X Tiger and Windows Vista, and the navigation bar in Firefox. (Had to get instructions from Lifehacker.com to get rid of them in Tiger. At least Vista gave me an obvious on-screen control to use.)
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TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 6:24PM 8-22-2008
I can't wait to have some wireless chips (probably somthing with software radio and more) in my brain and eyes and just be online everywhere all the time without the need to handle any devices for input or output
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