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?