2013 may be known as the year that AR finally hit its stride, with sightings of AR comic books, online ads, and "4D Augmented Reality" games and displays that let you do things like driving a virtual car through a chalk sculpture. Augmented Reality, or AR, is a new way of visualizing the world through smartphones, special glasses, and other applications. Google Glass is gaining interest in the medium, even though it is nowhere near the sci-fi level that true AR glasses can give you. You may have already seen examples of AR if you've watched a football game and seen the virtual first-down line, or seen graphics superimposed on the field showing yards to go or other information. Lately, AR is being used in ordinary smartphones so people can hold a phone up to places and see targeted advertising featuring businesses that may be on the inside of buildings. Augmented reality games make it possible to have virtual items in the real world, so you could be finding treasures in a maze that looks like an ordinary field to the casual observer. There is almost no limit to what can be done with AR applications, and software developers are creating AR Tool Kits that will probably represent a new "gold rush" in app development.
In a nutshell Augmented Reality is the digital overlaying of information or graphics on top of an image. In the past, it was reserved for expensive multimedia applications and television production, but now it is on the verge of becoming a ubiquitous technology that will be an integral part of video game consoles, smartphones (like Android phones and the iPhone) webcams, and pretty much anything that has an embedded CCD chip that can take pictures or video. If you’ve seen video games where you can wave your arms and interact with things on the screen, you are seeing AR in action. At some point you will be encountering AR graffiti if you happen to be wearing augmented reality glasses or a “head up display” which could be a thin band of plastic that goes over your eyes. Since AR understands the user’s 3D environment, you could conceivably run through a city and the images would always appear to be on the same walls and streets. Advertisers love the idea of AR because those blank spaces could be populated with customized messages. More recently, the Nintendo 3Ds has featured Augmented Reality cards that you can use to play games and add playable characters into realitic situations. On the Apple iPhone, a new app called WordLens will let you translate menus and signs into other languages, which could be extremely helpful for tourists, assuming of course that their phone network reaches to the spots that they are visiting. More recently, the Playstation Vita and Google's Project Glass have helped turn Augmented Reality into a household word, so it is only a matter of time before the mainstream understands the wonder of seeing things that aren't really there. At the present time, Patrick Hare is the owner of this website, and he would have done a lot more with it if he hadn't been distracted by everyday trivia and other side jobs that everyone wanted him to do. He thinks that AR is going to be as big, or bigger, than the Internet is today.
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