Augmented Reality's Disruptive Potential

pbahra writes "A company called Layar, based in Amsterdam, is working on products that take augmented reality in a slightly different direction. They provide a platform that allows anyone to build an AR app. Consider these ideas: you can use your mobile phone's camera to view the world; your phone knows where you are and what you are looking at. The implications are profound. One of the most interesting apps that someone produced was a virtual tee-shirt shop. It was placed in the 20 most expensive shopping streets in the world, selling t-shirts. Stop and think about that for a minute. He built a virtual shop where a real one already existed. His shop was accessible via a mobile phone, while the real one was accessible through, well, being real. Real space and its virtual overlay are being used by different people. There will be lawyers."

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Re:Retailers are shaking in their boots

[theshowmecanuck]

There is an excellent SciFi book called The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds where something like this plays a key role, but in an even grander scale. People chose what they want to look like in augmented reality, and most everyone have implants that pick this up and automatically route the image into their brain without having to look elsewhere like a smart phone screen (at least that is how I read it). People could walk around looking like they had horns, or were fauns or satyrs, etc. The lead character(s) who were a form of police had to wear special glasses since they could not afford to have artificial implants in their brain that could be hacked. But the augmented reality also hooked everyone in the society together (in ten thousand habitats orbiting a planet around a distant star from earth). It was an interesting take on how technology might impact reality in the future. Anyways, FWIW Reynolds writes some interesting stuff.