Following my discovery of QR tags, I'm continuing to wander down the road of bleeding edge technological developments that will influence not only the way that we find our way through space but also how we connect with locations and the things that they contain. With the advent of cheap and accurate GPS and accelerometry and the continued development of sophisticated mobile computing for the everyday user, the possibilities are quite staggering. As if I wasn't excited enough yesterday by the development of an entire store full of QR tagged merchandise related to my forthcoming book, I now discover the remarkable Enkin:
Imagine it. You're out on the street in a new city, hopelessly lost. Pull out your camera phone and point it at the closest building. The fun here would be that not only could the device tell you where you are (which a simple GPS device could already handle easily), but it could be used to provide annotation. A simple application would be something like a cyber-walking tour, but much more fun could be had by embedding something like this within an extended augmented reality game. Location-based games are already nicely underway in some quarters, but this seems like a way to jack up the graphics content of such games to make a more compelling hybrid of the real and the virtual.
It's exciting to see that this technology is finally coming to the fore, since I wrote about it in 2005 (http://www.regardingjohn.com/learn/research/GeoAnnotation.html). The Augmented Reality games Kurt Squire and our Local Games Lab has been researching for years was a good first step, but we didn't have the engineering teams to develop it. I'll be interested in seeing your forthcoming book. Let me know if you're accepting papers for it.
Posted by: John Martin | January 24, 2009 at 12:23 PM