If you have any interest in AR-you know,augmented reality-you’ll want to check out Chris Grayson’s audio podcasts with-some-slides, available on Viddler. While these 40 minute-long or so talks might not win an audience via offering punchy graphic design and peppy delivery, Grayson is a relief; he’s very thorough and doesn’t slip into a cheer leading style that sometimes seems a too common mistake in presentations on AR.
His calm, thorough explanations of what goes into some of the most interesting but little discussed technological innovations going on today are an education. Apps aimed at the rapidly growing mobile market are evolving at a blistering pace. (Did you know that apps designed for Apple’s iPhone make 99-percent of the profits that is made among all mobile apps?)
While you can start the series from the beginning, I came in at chapter 3. (You can access that video here.)
I can suggest starting with this one–about halfway through the presentation I saw some of the capabilities of new mobile AR apps that both give me a geeky sense of awe and ring every civil liberties and privacy warning bell.
These apps include some with the capability to employ data taken from a live facial scan of you taken with a cell phone video camera to identify you on the fly. The apps have a facial recognition capability, which identify you (not sure what database they were using to do that) and then quickly pull associated info about you from the web.
The person of interest in your cell phone is soon seen with Facebook and Twitter icons floating around them—now you just have to click on one to get all the personal info they’ve posted.
Of course if you had access to other databases with even more pertinent info—such as bank account balances or medical history—that would come up to before you even had a chance to say hi.
That’s just scary.
Updates: If you want to learn more about mobile AR, you might visit Columbia University’s site, as they’ve very active in researching real-world applications for the technology.
Going a next step, the group Augmented Reality New York sponsors monthly meetings where members and others present some of the latest research and product development. More info on that here.
You might also want to check out Chris Grayson’s comments (below) for links to his full series of talks on AR.
