The step from an attempt to be visually immersive to socially immersive and intellectually engaging is also fundamentally responsible. Why do 14 million people play WoW each month when the game fundamentally sucks on many levels? My friends play, I keep in touch with my peers and my family through it. It provides a distraction and a shared experience. Other environments have different things to offer, but the ones that interest me are social at their centers.

Are we to become cyborgs like Steve Mann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann) who has moved to glasses with readouts? I have no doubts that we will manage to integrate whatever comes down the pipeline with society, but I cannot help but notice the amount of attention that it takes my friends to send a text message, or to read an email if one happens to arrive during a conversation. If you create a layer of useful information over top of the environment there will ostensibly be an attention cost. Even if we are sharing the information.

If the two people in your example are you and me and I am facing a TV (in a gallery or bar or persons home) I will be distracted, so much so that I will change my position relative to you so that I cannot see the TV and I can pay attention to you. That is a failing in me, and I am well aware of it.

So in closing, I would like to say that I like the idea of being able to separate from the computer, but at the moment the work I am doing requires powerful machines. I am looking at a net-book to write on and am totally peeved about staring into a light bulb for hours at a time at night. I suspect though that a few tweaks on the technology will clear that up. Oh yes and my computer has a camera on it too. Any plans for luggable AR?

Second, the idea here is to augment the world around us, and make that a shared experience. Think of two people talking in an art gallery, at the grocery store, in a hotel lobby, or a campus dorm. These environments are varied, and filled with various stimuli (or distractions) but that doesn’t change the dynamics of the personal interaction or conversation.

Mobile AR should be the same way. It should augment the local environment (equivalent to adding new pieces of art to the gallery, more options at the grocery store, extra newspapers and magazines in the hotel lobby, and a few more sorority girls at the dorm), but not replace it. This is one of the differences between AR and VR. VR was designed to completely immerse you in other environments.

Also, Rubiyat, I’d like to make a distinction between virtual worlds (success!) and virtual reality (fail!). Yes, they both have a core element that is a 3D environment, but the other aspects are quite different. VR failed early on, for a number of reasons, and one of them was the tremendous hype from Hollywood and other sectors that raised expectations too high. The hardware and the industry couldn’t keep up.

The AR industry has incredible potential but faces many of the same risks, particularly over hyping. I’m already beginning to see this all over the net with people talking about contact lenses or photoshopped conceptual devices as if they already exist and will be out by Christmas. It is one thing to talk about the future and where thngs are going, should go, and could go, but it needs to be a little thought out and with balanced expectations.

Oh, one more point, mobile AR will encourage more user to user interaction, not less. It isn’t meant (in my opinion) to cause people to withdraw into their own little worlds (heh) but rather get out, and explore their surroundings with other people. Mobile AR could kill the backbreaking rut of being hunched over a keyboard with a mouse and a pale glowing monitor late into the night. I want the future, but I don’t want to be a hunchbacked zombie when it arrives.

I hadn’t seen that particular product, but of course anticipated it. I am curious about what effect this will have on our interactions. I certainly might have missed something here, but isn’t it like having an iPod plugged into one ear? The augmented data layers over/in/through the ambient reality.

Will people want to wear this constantly or will it be like an iPod or noise canceling headphones? Culturally what will it mean to have people focused on their own worlds but moving about in the shared physical reality?

is this the cyborg? either way it is intriguing and I am anxious to see what develops. (I am still being gee whizzed

have u seen:
“Vuzix Wrap 920AV Video Sunglasses Feature “See-Thru” Quantum Optics“?

Will people adopt a wearable monitor (especially as fashionable sunglasses)? It certainly is possible given the extended use of visual devices by cyborgs like Steve Mann, but most of us end up taking off our headphones to have a conversation. I am rambling a bit here, but glasses, and particularly monitors compete for our attention. Studies indicate that we really don’t multitask well. The clever combination of cues and clues in a geospatial environment that matches our attention needs is going to be critical.

I remember when cell phones with in ear headsets became popular. It was odd seeing more people than usual walking around talking to themselves. What will a mostly on AR do to the way we encounter the environment?

The shift in virtual reality that made it the massive success it is today was one of hardware to software. The shift from a headset and glove to the window of a PC and the view of Azeroth. Further it also relies heavily on the social connection in that almost no one is in a virtual environment by themself for any length of time.

I am not entirely convinced that immersion through glasses and “terminator vision” are the solution here. I have to agree though that they are coming, and if there are apps ready for the early adopters they will achieve some foothold as long as there is no social stigma associated with them.

In the end I think that there will need to be a culture shift to accommodate the fundamental shift in information infrastructure. To this end I think that an early adoption by artists will ease the way in this primarily visual medium.