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Pollution visualized: Another application developed at Columbia shows carbon monoxide levels projected over New York City. The height of each ball reflects concentrations of the pollutant.
Sean White and Steve Feiner, Columbia University
Another potential obstacle for AR is social acceptance. While people already text or check e-mail while they walk, looking through a phone can be awkward. Feiner suggests that well-designed goggles could help. "There's a very high bar of what people are willing to wear on their heads," he says.
Last spring, a group at the MIT Media Lab demoed an interface that avoids the need to look at a display altogether. Graduate student Prana Mistry, a 2009 TR35 winner, developed SixthSense, a device that combines a webcam and a projector worn around the neck, along with colored markers on the fingers, to recognize a user's gestures and project information onto surfaces. (See a TR video of SixthSense in action here.)
"Your world can be augmented without you having to change your behavior and do anything extra [like] taking out your cell phone and starting an application," says MIT professor Pattie Maes, who heads the SixthSense project. Maes's group is also exploring technical applications for AR. "If my car stops working, I might open the hood and an expert might remotely see what I see and [then] project information in front of the engine, saying things like, 'Open this valve,'" explains Maes.
Nokia's Mobile Augmented Reality Applications and Mixed Reality Experiences projects aim to use a combination of hardware in AR applications. Ville-Veikko Mattila, the senior research manager at Nokia Research Center, believes that combining visual and audio information could be most practical. "I think it's clear that people won't be walking and holding a device upright. Therefore, the use of audio may be more intuitive," he says.
Mattila adds that AR could potentially combine social information and location-based services to give user-tailored recommendations. For example, an application could show what your friends think of a particular restaurant, instead of providing a guidebook's reviews.
"There's a lot of hype obviously," Feiner says. But ultimately he agrees that AR may be able to help people with their daily lives. "Like being able to get somewhere, find information, or recognize a face of a person you know, but can't remember the name of," he says.
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This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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brianjking
4 Comments
Great Article
Great article covering augmented reality applications & current research and implementations. Additionally the discussion of the current technological limitations provide benefits to the market so that they can deliver hardware that provides more benefits to AR development, providing benefits to the AR developers, the companies that produce the hardware, and the end users.
Additionally the biggest limitation that I currently see (I've worked on an augmented reality project using parabolic photography) is that most AR projects at the present moment rely on expensive equipment, head mounted hardware (safety concern as well as numerous other issues to consider such as fashion and portability); although these two main issues are being focused on and new developments are rapidly coming to the market. Excited for the future and the ideation ahead in AR technology.
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