Augmented Reality Presentation

I attended the BCS Glasgow Branch tonight for a presentation on Augmented Reality given by Yolande Kolstee, who is the project leader of the AR+RFID Lab, a collaborative initiative of the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

before the meeting I had been following a couple of keen AR people and had retweeted the odd message about things that had taken my interest.

But everything I had seen before was about static AR, whereas Yolande's team seem mainly to be looking at mobile AR, effectively like next generation virtual reality (except its not because it mixes in reality rather than being all virtual). They also use RFID tags to enable the user to interact with many objects and the systemm to know what's going on.

Some interesting bits of art, interesting ways of prototyping new furniture, but it still feels like it has the same problems of practicality of the hardware, immersion helmet style.

She also demonstrated some static AR, particularly things they have done for a museum where they have digitized ancient pottery and when you look at the page in the "catalog" you see the pottery in 3D, with music of the era, etc. Those were wow displays and maybe that reflects the areas where AR will make a huge impact over the next decade.