Augmented reality is popping up everywhere, and with the new generation of mobile devices (iPhone 3GS & Android) it's becoming something that you can take with you and access anywhere. So that raises the questions: How can augmented reality work in our everyday lives?
If you could develop an augmented reality system usable via your mobile phone, what would it do?
Rather than augment reality with my mobile phone, what I would do instead is use the real world to augment data. That's what we've been doing with carbon dioxide emissions data at Carbon Quilt: http://carbonquilt.org. Initially we are using Google Maps. We will soon offer 3D representations, and then mobile phone applications that allow users to 'see' quantities of carbon dioxide superimposed on their immediate environment.
Here's the thing: the real World is pretty easy to navigate already. Abstract data, on the other hand, is much harder to find your way around, mostly because it is abstract. Using the real World as a concrete 'canvas' on which to paint information can help a lot. Abstract quantities and comparisons come to life when placed against a backdrop of buildings and/or landscapes we know intimately.
Simple scale example: the distance to the Sun is 149 million km and the distance to the nearest star is over 40 trillion km. That doesn't mean much to me, either. But we can use the Earth itself to make sense of those numbers. If the Earth were 1 mm across, then the sun would be nearly 12 metres away and the nearest star 3,174 km (distance between New York and Salt Lake City). Those are numbers we can relate to physically. Our embodied experience of the World itself has given us insight into the quantities such as the distance between stars. All kinds of data are amenable to similar treatment; greenhouse gas emissions are what we are working on at the moment.
The process of creating concrete visualisations by using the real-world as a canvas or platform for abstract data is something I call 'Reality Augmented Data' or 'RAD'.
Adam Nieman, GovEd Communications
So rather than Augmented Reality with Data, you're looking to Augment Data with Reality? An interesting spin on the idea, for sure.
I looked at the CarbonQuilt website, looks promising once it's had a bit more spit and polish applied. I found it a bit confusing until I realized the red box was meant to indicate the Amount, I initially thought it was indicating an area I was going to analyze in a second nonexistant step.
Dewey Decimal is humanities sciences business. I'd do reiterating ethics, tech, admin. xyz graphs.
