At the moment, most augmented reality applications run on mobile phones, which is actually a good fit – modern cell phones have nice screens, cameras and enough processing power to make this a practical platform. Holding your phone out in front of your face, however, is far some seamless.

I have no doubt that at some point AR will compliment what we see by feeding us information on people, places and things that enter our field of vision. Until we use some sort of contact lens or neural/retinal implant that accomplishes this, we may have to make due with glasses like the Wrap 920AR, which debuted this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

From the press release:

With the new Wrap 920AR, users can view the real-world environment and computer-generated imagery seamlessly mixed together; allowing video game characters to jump out of the TV and come to life in your living room, or magazines and books with animated links back to the web in real time.

The stereo camera pair delivers a single 1504 x 480 side-by-side image that can be viewed in 3D stereoscopic video, while the video eyewear provides an unprecedented 67-inch display as seen from 10 feet. The Wrap 920AR also includes a 6 Degree-of-Freedom Tracker, which allows for absolute accuracy of roll pitch and yaw and also X, Y and Z positioning in 3D space.

The glasses are set to retail for $799.99.

(Via Engadget)

Rise of the Smartphone

While people have had access to smartphones for some time, 2009 saw an explosion in the popularity and level of adoption of these devices as nearly every mobile carrier focused on promoting these phones and their accompanying unlimited data plans. While top-of-the-line smartphones used to cost hundreds of dollars, these devices can be found at very affordable price points today, and the creation of “app stores” has given customers new ways to customize their mobile experience. Our smartphones now serve as our “exobrains” and enable us to store and access vast amounts of information, navigate unfamiliar areas and communicate with the world. In addition, improved processing power, always-on Internet connections, GPS capability and cameras have also led to practical and useful applications of augmented reality. That leads to…

Useful Augmented Reality

While there may have been demonstrations of AR prior to 2009, this was the year that finally got the technology into people’s hands and made it useful. Applications like Yelp and Google Goggles use the capabilities of the latest smartphones to access reviews of businesses around users and perform searches using pictures, not words. Marketers also discovered how AR could enhance their products, and we saw innovations like AR-enhanced baseball cards and toys that provide additional levels of interactivity.

Transhuman Films Hit the Festival Circuit

Like him or not, inventor and author Ray Kurzweil has been perhaps the most visible and prolific singularitarian/ transhumanist thinker, and has been a great influence on many, including yours truly. Kurzweil has raised awareness of radical longevity, the singularity, and the technologies that will bring them about, including nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and gene therapy. Given his influence, it is perhaps unsurprising that someone would create a film exploring his ideas. That happened this year with the unveiling of a Kurzweil biopic, Transcendent Man, on the festival circuit. Next year we’ll see the theatrical debut of The Singularity is Near, written by Kurzweil himself.

Progress in Advanced Prosthetics

For too long, progress in designing prosthetic limbs has been slow, forcing injured soldiers to rely on 50+ year old technology to replace missing limbs. Driven at least in part by the number of soldiers maimed in combat, development of advanced prosthetic limbs, especially arms and hands, saw massive progress in 2009. We’ve seen arms that, for the first time, approximate the use of the original limb they are trying to replace – complete with the ability to be controlled by the user’s mind and provide tactile feedback in lieu of actual touch. We’ve also seen prosthetic legs that arguably give disabled runners an advantage over their nondisabled competitors.

To be continued…

Admittedly, these are pretty major issues. Screen size is a necessary evil given the size requirements of phones, and these limitations affect the input devices as well. Touchscreens are inaccurate, and even the best thumb keyboards are cramped and force you to type slowly. If we could transcend a physical input device, say by interfacing with a phone through thought alone, it would go a long way to enabling people to more fully share information without the trouble of typing it out.

Researchers at Intel are busy working on ways to interface with televisions, computers and cell phones using only brain waves measured with a small sensor implanted in the brain:

Today, Intel’s Pomerleau said various research facilities are developing technologies to sense activity from inside the skull.

“If we can get to the point where we can accurately detect specific words, you could mentally type,” he added. “You could compose characters or words by thinking about letters flashing on the screen or typing whole words rather than their individual characters.”

Researchers have already made great progress in enabling monkeys to control robot arms with their brains, and humans have been able to type limited messages using only their thoughts, even posting to Twitter just by thinking about it. Combine this with a tiny virtual retinal display or some way to send optical signals directly to the brain and you’ve got yourself a total revolution in the way humans share and receive information, as well as the death of the traditional monitor/keyboard/mouse means of interacting with computers.

It’s about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature’s ultimate machine.

So far, posts have ranged from the practical to the fanciful, covering the future of user interface, real-life examples of people who have modified their bodies, how “wearable tech” has evolved over the years, advances in prosthetics, biotech developments, and more.

While on a recent trip to Brazil, I managed to get around with a very rudimentary grasp of Portuguese and knowledge of a few well-worn phrases; “please,” “thank you,” “how much does this cost,” and so on. While most of the Brazilians I met were able to figure out what I was trying to tell them, I often had problems understanding what they were trying to tell me.

Of course I would have killed for a “Universal Translator,” which has been a sci-fi dream for years (along with being a convenient plot device to explain why aliens all speak perfect English) - such a device would enable people to communicate clearly despite their respective spoken languages.

In what may be a step toward that ultimate goal, NEC announced a prototype language translation system called the “Tele Scouter”:

The Tele Scouter glasses feature a compact microphone and camera, which picks up the foreign-language conversation. This audio recording is then relayed to a small computer worn on the user’s waist, which transmits the information to a remote server. The server translates the words from speech to text, and transmits it back to the glasses, where the translated phrase is then appears on a tiny retinal display, providing the wearer with a transcript of the conversation in their own language.

Unfortunately, the technology to provide actual real-time translation hasn’t been perfected yet, so NEC will be marketing the glasses as a “wearable, hands-free data display,” expected to go on sale in 2010.