State of Augmented Reality Aug 2010

I confess I was not excited by the “world`s first mobile Augmented Reality Magazine Edition” (press release, blog and video from GIS User) but I was interested in the details of the session on the topic at Search Engine Strategies.

It’s serendipitous that we just finished this topic in my course at Penn State. My students, heads down hard core GIS types, were not familiar with AR at all. And, there issues/concerns matched those at SES only slightly.

One topic both the session and my students addressed: “- Use AR to solve a specific need” My students were not impressed by GIS as a gimmick, but really wanted to find implementations that really made work or life better.

The other topic that overlapped dealt with privacy issues. One of my students painted the same scenario as Mike Leibhold: “Facial recognition and social mining are also interesting AR developments, but the idea is a little scary and opens up a can of worms where privacy is concerned. Imagine taking a picture of a complete stranger and having the ability to find out information about them.” I’ll point out here what I did in class: AR in and of itself is simply an interface to that information; right know you could probably get that same information via a Google search. It’s just be delivered in a different medium. In short, don’t shoot the messenger.

One point my students raised that doesn’t seem to get much discussion is safety. What are the issues with driving a car and getting enhanced information via the windshield or eye glasses? What about pedestrians walking looking through cell phones to access information?

Finally, one of my students saw the potential for AR use in geographic education. I’m a bit skeptical of that for now, but others are taking it quite seriously. In the SES session Mathijs Gajentaan (Winvolve) noted a Civil War AR project that’s underway and looking for funding.