Wednesday, December 26, 2012

2013: Gaming Platforms & Augmented Reality Google Glasses



2013 is going to be a great year, not only for me but for gamers as well. I have a baby due in May, Lucas and Jasmyne rode the Atlantis roller coaster at Sea World a few months ago and they now love roller coasters, this year we will have to go to Castles and Coasters. 

Nintendo just released the Wii U and both Microsoft and Sony plan on releasing a new gaming console before the end of the year, probably just in time for Christmas 2013. The PlayStation 4 and the XBOX 720 are set to release before 2014 and I’m sure gamers worldwide will nut themselves once they get a finalized release date.

Another gadget that is projected to release this year is ‘Google Glass.’ This pair of glasses is basically your computer right on top of your head. The goal is to help make augmented reality a daily part of our lives using just a tiny computer within the frame of the glasses. For those of us already wearing eyeglasses, think of it like you can use your eyes to simply pull up weather, store specials, sports scores as you’re looking at a baseball stadium, or whatever you want — all while simply moving your head as you walk down the street. Yes, this means many of us will be walking around by 2019 looking like we all have turrets syndrome.

Glass is, simply put, a computer built into the frame of a pair of glasses, and it’s the device that will make augmented reality part of our daily lives. With the half-inch (1.3 cm) display, which comes into focus when you look up and to the right, users will be able to take and share photos, video-chat, check appointments and access maps and the Web. Consumers should be able to buy Google Glass by 2014.

Augmented reality (AR) is a live view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are altered by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.

Basically what this means is that it is a more general concept reality, in which the view of reality is modified by a computer. Augmentation is conventionally in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements, such as sports scores on TV during a match. With the help of advanced AR technology (e.g. adding computer vision and object recognition) the information about the surrounding real world of the user becomes interactive with artificial information about the environment and its objects can be overlaid on the real world.

Take a look at the video below simulating how these glasses may work:


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