Augmented Reality Glasses

In 1993, acclaimed science-fiction writer William Gibson published his fourth novel, Virtual Light.

The Hitchcockian “MacGuffin” of the novel’s plot was a small pair of black sunglasses capable of overlaying textual and graphical data onto one’s view of objects in the real world. The resulting marriage of display technology and three-dimensional space allows characters in the book to look through the glasses at a cityscape and see the shapes and names of buildings not yet built, or to analyze a crime scene with relevant data seemingly hovering in the air before them, supplied by an authorized download from a local police database.

In Gibson’s most recent work, Spook Country, one of the main characters is hired by a magazine editor to research the burgeoning underground trend of locative art. In the novel, artists create vivid 3-D renderings of celebrities’ deaths, geotagging them to coordinates in the real world. By donning a clunky set of see-thru goggles wired to a GPS device one is able to stare upon River Phoenix’s dead body on an LA street, or witness F. Scott Fitzgerald having a heart attack at precisely the point in space where it happened.

Whereas virtual reality glasses are essentially just computer displays for the eyes- replacing a conventional monitor with a pair of screens for a more immersive effect- augmented reality glasses allow information to be graphically overlaid onto one’s view of the real world. Sets of VR and AR headgear have been available for decades, though their applicability has been limited by their cost, unwieldy size, and lack of ubiquity. Even the idea of augmented reality itself is old news.

The first AR headset was developed in the mid-sixties by computer scientist, Ivan Sutherland. His device, nicknamed “The Sword Of Damocles”, was so cumbersome that it required a suspended frame hung from the ceiling in order to work. Using mirrors, it projected the illusion of a wireframe cube hovering over the space directly in front of the wearer.

Nowadays, AR is finally getting off the ground thanks to projects like ARToolkit, which give developers the software tools they need to develop augmented reality applications.

Though both VR and AR headgear have the capability of translating head movement and eye movement into an ever increasing array of options for user input, only augmented reality devices possess the potential to join the wealth of information on the internet with one’s everyday travels- something that’s already been happening with camera-equipped mobile phones.

Today, the average iPhone or Android phone user can, at the most basic level, use their device to locate themselves geo-spatially, pick a nearby restaurant, determine the quickest route, and Twitter their developing itinerary to their friends. Imagine that rudimentary functionality extended by an inconspicuous pair of lightweight AR glasses with a CMOS camera embedded in the frame and a bluetooth connection to one’s internet-dedicated mobile phone.

A simple function of these glasses might combine visual information stored on a social network with facial recognition software, allowing a real-time overlay of people’s online profiles as they walk down a city street and into the view of the user. The glasses, which could record faces via the embedded camera, could then cross-reference a passerby’s facial signature with an online database of person-specific tags (similar to ratemycop.com), alerting and informing the wearer with micro-summaries of someone’s personality or warnings of their character flaws.

Through those glasses of Gibson’s we can glimpse hints at a future in which the internet will assimilate into and over the real world, and not the other way around.