Here’s what I’m talking about. The following video has been going around recently and is quite interesting:

It’s mixing AR with Twitter. It’s a sweet concept and as Twitter already geotags your tweets you’d think those tweets would appear digitally in the same spot where they were published. But it doesn’t necessarily seem to working that way, there’s no sound so I can’t figure out what’s really going on, but it appears that ghosts are tweeting from halfway up trees? Not to worry though it’s the thought that counts, just think about sitting in a bar and looking across the room and seeing the crowds tweets in speech bubbles above their heads. Neat huh?

I came across this guy earlier this week and he’s been giving me inspiration:

It’s Mr super sneaky invisible stealth dude. And I really like the fact that his art is analogue and yet it’s helped me to trigger a digital concept. It’s basically to combine the above AR Twitter app with TwitPic. So you’re walking through London and you see before you a huge collage of photos perfectly placed in their exact locations, sometimes even overlapping, the compass and gyroscope in our mobile devices enables the photo to appear in its exact location, angle, and dimensions. And with a city that big it probably wouldn’t be long until everything you see before you has completely become the alternative reality created by the Twittersphere, maybe transparently overlaying the actual reality. Yeah it’s kind of a cool idea but it’s a bit messy. But what happens if we throw in an extra dimension, that of time, the time of day to be exact? Now the photo will only appear at the exact time of the day it was taken, hang around for a few moments, then disappear. Imagine it, you stand there and watch a busy London street, Leicester Square even, and as you do photos fade in for a moment then vanish, hundreds of photos come and go every second, the ghosts of days and years long past are alive again for a brief moment every new day, forever changing our perception of reality and the very idea of space and time. Trippy.

Actually thinking about it this is probably something else I came across recently that greatly contributed to the inspiration for this idea.

So c’mon folks help me out, we gotta come up with a new name for this technology as the current term has already been killed by inferior technologies falsely claiming to be it. Maybe like ‘Super Vision’ or something, anything that’s different. Let’s just come up with a new name already so we can talk about it without throwing up in our mouths a little, so we can be really excited about this technology again.

For the most part it seems many of the implementations of this technology so far have been very gimmicky, though I just recently came across the USPS Package Simulator which is the first practical usage of the technology I’ve seen. Of course as practical as it seems to be, its real world usefulness could be limited which could land it back in the gimmick column, I don’t send packages ever so I just don’t know.

Gaming so far seems to be the best way to highlight this technology. And I really love what Topps has done, in a time when the baseball trading cards industry was in serious decline due to modern day gaming, they found a way to marry their product with gaming, by using the augmented reality technology. I’ve yet to try it out for real, though I keep telling myself I’ll buy a pack of baseball cards next time I’m at the 7-11. It looks really fun (as in innocent, simple fun), I hope it’s helping turn the industry around. Checkout the instructions and watch the video below:

Another game I’ve come across, which is breaking away from the confines of the desktop, is a Tegra Zombie game. I won’t go into it much, if you haven’t seen it yet it’s pretty amazing, just watch the video:

I can picture this taking place on a huge scale, the size of a football field or bigger, with hundreds of gamers walking around with the device in their hands, all connected wirelessly in one giant game! And better yet the devices wouldn’t be hand held but tv goggles, and the buildings and zombies would be life size! It’s really not that far away folks, in fact Jobs and Gates probably play this shit already in each others basements!

Of course all this isn’t really true augmented reality, it is to an extent, but it’s limited to a certain environment and true augmented reality lives in the real world. This type of technology has just started coming out recently thanks to mobile devices with built-in camera, GPS, compass, and fast internet that are capable of placing what they see with pinpoint accuracy. I can barely imagine what’s to come, what’s currently being developed, or even what currently exists in some mad scientists laboratory. But check the following video out if you haven’t already. It’s a true augmented reality app released by IBM for Android phones for people wandering around at the Wimbledon tennis club. With the entire Wimbledon complex tagged and hooked up to monitors you can look through your device and see what’s going on around you with supplemental information. I think what really blew me away was the fact you can look across the lawn club and see where all the restrooms are and it even shows you how long the lines are so you can make sure you join the one with the shortest wait!