*Pocket augment wand. Okay, that's just great, but the idea of a gig called the "International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented
Reality" is enough to baffle Philip K. Dick. I mean: suppose you went in there and you couldn't get un-mixed and de-augmented?
What THEN, eh?
Link: Technology Review: TR10: Augmented Reality.
Last October, a team led by Markus Kähäri unveiled a prototype of the system at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. The team added a GPS sensor, a compass, and accelerometers to a Nokia smart phone. Using data from these sensors, the phone can calculate the location of just about any object its camera is aimed at. Each time the phone changes location, it retrieves the names and geographical coördinates of nearby landmarks from an external database. The user can then download additional information about a chosen location from the Web–say, the names of businesses in the Empire State Building, the cost of visiting the building's observatories, or hours and menus for its five eateries.
The Nokia project builds on more than a decade of academic research into mobile augmented reality. Steven Feiner, the director of Columbia University's Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Laboratory, undertook some of the earliest research in the field and finds the Nokia project heartening. "The big missing link when I started was a small computer," he says. "Those small computers are now cell phones."
