I’ve read an awful lot lately on innovations that should help with the next wave of advanced imaging techniques. I’m talking at the consumer level, not new NASA technologies or research in the medical field. Let me lay out a few examples. Macstories recently reported on an app being developed to support glass-free 3D viewing on an iPad. It works using the iPad’s (or iPhone’s) front-facing camera to track a user’s head movements and simulate a 3D image. Gizmodo meanwhile posted earlier this week on a new iPhone accessory in the works called the Dot, which attaches to your phone to provide 360-degree video capture. It’s still in pre-production, but Kogeto, the company behind the Dot, is already taking pre-orders.
And then there’s the Augmented Reality movement. AR company Metaio has shown off a bunch of cool applications including in-store retail kiosks (see the awesome Lego Store demo), location-specific graphics (see Scoble’s video coverage of metaio showing a dragon crawling up the side of a building in Munich), and CE diagnostics capabilities that make it possible to troubleshoot a hardware problem without ever reaching for the manual.
Add all of these examples up with increasing bandwidth and computational capacity, and I think we’re going to see a massive leap forward in the next five years on the virtual imaging front. Holodeck, anyone?
Oh man, I better start working on some complex 3D mysteries set in Victorian England.
Have to say as far as I was concerned, the major reason to add a front facing camera on the iPad 2 was to get head tracking in games. I’m VERY surprised there hasn’t been much news about it, at least until this week. I mean facial recognition is a feature built into even the cheapest cameras these days. With no buttons and a preference for the fewest possible controls in iOS games, the ability to “look around you” simply by moving your head around seems like an obvious choice, but I guess Apple hasn’t added the capability to the OS yet so nobody is building it in. Maybe we’ll see something at WDC? A cool game demo maybe?
Thanks for the link to Metaio Mari. I’ve always thought AR apps had the potential to be cool, but the ones I tried on iOS generally sucked enough I just uninstalled them immediately. Their junaio browser is the first one I’m keeping on the phone to play with.
Glenn- Glad to hear you’re liking the junaio browser. My current phone is too pathetic to do much with it, but like you, I see a lot of potential.