It’s becoming ever more clear to me that the transitional technology to fully immersive human-centered augmented reality (a world I described in previous posts as “eccescopic”) will most be the SmartPhone.
In particular, some form of good 3D video capture is going to go on the back of SmartPhones. It might be a variant on the structured-light technology in Microsoft’s Kinect, or it might just be two-camera stereo combined with very good algorithms for extracting distance from stereo pairs.
When this happens, SmartPhones will start to become more like the Nintendo 3DS — through our SmartPhones we will start to see virtual objects in the world around us. This will create a pressure for a new generation of SmartPhone that has an autostereoscopic display that continually adjusts for your viewing position and distance as you hold your phone.
A parallel development will take place with our tablets. At some point those little phones in our pockets and slates in our hands will become windows into a shared augmented world. Application builders will come to take this capability for granted, at which point that parallel world will rapidly become an ever richer and more interesting place.
At some point this parallel world will become so compelling that wearables will kick in. WIthin a few years SmartPhones, having finished their job as a transitional technology, will simply disappear, and our cyber-enhanced world will be something we see and hear all around us, with our own eyes and ears.
To us, this world will simply be reality. To go about one’s day without the ability to see, hear and interact with this reality may eventually come to seem as odd and eccentric as going to town buck naked.