Augmented Reality Contact Lenses

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of glasses or contact lenses that overlay a digital reality overtop the existing one. In my novel Ragamuffin I called that layered reality, augmented reality, Lamina.

As a result, a lot of people who’ve read Ragamuffin have all made sure to email this link about DARPA investing in augmented reality contact lenses.

But also of relevance is that Google is developing (reportedly), Android-powered smart glasses.

That’s a bit more primitive, but the more likely around-the-corner technology that would be useful. A digital heads up display for your world.

People often ask “won’t that be overwhelming?” But the truth is we augment our reality all the time. And to be honest, right now we do it in a fairly crude way with physical objects:

We already ‘layer’ our physical environs with markup. All we’re doing is abstracting it away from the purely physical, which will allow more tricks.

And can you imagine playing an RPG via augmented reality? Brings a whole new meaning to LARPing. In the old days paper and pen RPG was the domain of imaginative die-hards, associated with nerd-dom. Now millions will play Skyrim. Play that game with LARP mechanics in a large city…

Filed under the topic Uncategorized on February 9th 2012 at 2:39 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.