“Augmented Reality has been around as a concept for a long time. It has very often been described in images of the future as enhancing the real world with additional layers of digitally created information. As more people are becoming aware of virtual worlds and seeking to build within them they, in general, start with trying to recreate some element of Real Life. This may be representations of themselves as avatars, existing buildings and offices they frequent. real world metaphors such as chairs, tables, presentation screens. This is something I have observed as the willingness to engage with virtual worlds has extended past gamers and early adopters. The representation is focussed on the boundaries of the environment being used and on how to manipulate the building tools to create that vision, crafting for that environment.

We are seeing more uses of things from the real world crossing over into the non-game metaverse environments. e.g. tennis ball trajectories and scores from Wimbledon into Second Life.

Is this augmented mixed reality? Are we creating Augmented Reality for virtual worlds? Is there a continuous circle feeding real things and virtual things into representations of one another?”

This circle of real to virtual and back again has become increasingly easy to demonstrate.

I have been impressed recently with things like ARTag. The simplicity by which we were able to explore Augmenting Real and Virtual means scope for many ideas to be tried out. With companies like fabjectory making the virtual objects into real objects on a commercial level we are able to glimpse a local fabrication future. Creating elements of what you need as physical objects when you need them from virtual resources has quite a future I think. Many of these things have existed before but not with the ease of access to the general population…” Continue reading Augmented Mixed Reality - Real to virtual and back again by Ian Hughes