More on Augmented Reality

In a comment on my previous post, one of my readers pointed out that the military has invested a great deal of money in augmented realty projects like "DARPA's ULTRA-Vis project, ARA's related iLeader system, and the HUD contract given to Lockheed-Martin and subcontracted to Microvision." He assures me that the military is way ahead of the rest of the world with augmented reality research. I appreciate the information on these projects, but I stand by my original post. Despite the military's lead on AR hardware and applications, I believe civilian world technology will quickly overrun it. Here's why.

Augmented reality is not merely a piece of hardware or a software application; it is a new medium in which thousands of innovative applications can run and a virtually limitless torrent of information can be processed and displayed. Its capabilities are limited only by the imaginations of developers.

From what I can see, the military's approach to AR is to build a proprietary piece of hardware and program it with a fixed set of capabilities: "We're going to build a system that lets you display this kind of data, give these commands to your troops, etc." This follows the traditional pattern of military contracting, is generally very expensive, and is difficult and slow to change or upgrade.

The civilian world's approach is quite different. AR's primitive platforms are Android and the iPhone. With Android, Google has said, "We're designing a completely open platform that has a GPS, a magnetic compass, inclinometers and accelerometers, graphics hardware, and full access to the Internet. We're also giving you all the tools to program it yourself (for free). How you use it is entirely up to you. To encourage innovation, we're running a contest with $2 million in prizes. Now... Go unleash your creative potential and design something cool!" Within a year we have programs like Layar that can overlay virtually any kind of information as layers over the real world, or like Wikitude that can display geotagged Wikipedia data. The hardware is certainly not as elegant as a a DARPA or Microvision HUD, but in some ways, the capability is already greater than any proprietary military system. As hardware improves, the capability will grow. As new technology becomes available--HUD glasses or contact lenses, better voice recognition, gesture sensing, image recognition, even thought-controlled interfaces--companies like Google that understand crowdsourcing will put this technology into the hands of the crowd. The crowd will generate more novel applications, at a much quicker pace, than a small team of employees working for a defense contractor on a single proprietary project. As the technology enters the mainstream, it will bring fundamental changes to society.

I want to emphasize how radical I believe this new technology is. I believe we're at the beginning of a major technological shift. Until now, we have always viewed the digital world through small rectangular screens; now the digital world is about to flood out into the real world. Instead of designing new worlds in online games like Second Life, graphic designers and gamers will be able to "skin" the real world with photorealistic 3D imaginative overlays. Instead of video chatting with my parents on a flat screen using Skype, I could soon be speaking with 3D representations of them who appear to be sitting right in front of me. Throughout my day, I could simply look at things--a historical landmark, a new book I'm thinking about buying, a new restaurant--and instantaneously view a wealth of data online. Instead of texting with his thumbs (that's SO 2009, dad!) my son will grow up composing messages to his friends in his head. Pilots could pull up approach plates and see 3D projections of glideslopes and localizers, a car mechanic could take one look under a hood and pull up the relevant specs and order necessary parts, a doctor could have his entire medical library at a patient's bedside, and a police officer or secret service agent could see flashing visual cues when a weapon appears in a crowd. This is not merely a new piece of hardware; it's a new way of life.

To summarize, a proprietary piece of hardware running proprietary software will be able to do just one thing: the task its designers create it to do. An open AR platform--just like a computer or an iPhone--is an open platform that can do whatever its users want. Yes, it's primitive, but expect to see the technology mature rapidly. There is certainly a place for proprietary technology, especially in the military--we rely on all sorts of propretiary technology every day--but if we do not keep stride with developments in the broader mobile/AR world, our capabilities will fall far behind. The reason I raised my concerns in my previous post is because the military tends to lag at adopting new technologies embraced by the civilian world; in some cases (blogs and social networking), it actively resists them. If futurists like Ray Kurzweil are right, the rate of technological development and accompanying social change is accelerating at an exponential rate. This means the US military will pay an increasingly high price if it does not learn how to recognize and adopt emerging technologies from the civilian world.