Thursday, February 18, 2010

Living Legends

About a week ago, the guys over at RalVision.ae were inspired by some history channel concept videos and ended up writing a piece about the educational possibilities for augmented reality- specifically in terms of history and interaction with the past:

Will History disappear, if we can “see” the past via Augmented Reality?

"What if we could harness Technology, to educate and stimulate the younger generation to value and cherish tradition but in a non text book manner, and thus impart education to them with help from the same devices that they seem hooked onto. In effect, hijack these devices in an interesting way, so as to break into a students "Digital personal space" which they are not so keen to give up that easily.

Some note worthy apps are Layar, WikiTude and Junaio. These applications allow a person to “annotate” the living living world. It’s actually blurring the line between the Digital and the real world.



The Junaio application allows you to actually have animated 3d objects placed at different locations. Re-animating ancient battles and wars at the actual locations, brings a whole new dimension to learning and keeps History alive! As any place on Earth can be annotated or “geo-tagged”, this will promote the learning of History and heritage when visiting these different countries.

These ”Digital Ghosts”, will be inhabiting our world alongside us, waiting to be revealed through the View Finder of a Smart phone, and in the next few years via digital sunglasses such as those fromVuzix. This will further blur the line between our present world and History – So will History be “history” if it’s always living with us?"

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They're definitely on to it, but the idea goes much, much further in terms of the digital ghosts they were talking about at the end. From my earlier post on education:

"...when combined with transparent visuals we get something completely new. Imagine walking up to the Twin Towers and watching a realistic, stationary CGI simulation of its construction in real size [UPDATE]. Time could be sped up to show the building rise in ten minutes or 30 seconds. Then imagine being able to watch a recreation of the September 11th terrorist attack with sound and visuals of explosions, audio bites of news anchors delivering the information, a montage of newspaper headlines, and simulations of running crowds, yelling firefighters, and lots of smoke- in real size and in a sort of transparent half-virtual reality. Or imagine walking onto a battlefield and being able to see a panoramic, 360 degree simulation of the battle of Gettysburg, complete with overhead maps of troop movement and the ability to hit “pause” at any time. Each of these simulations would come with three or four different levels of realism- after all, we probably wouldn’t want to expose a group of ten year olds to the full carnage of warfare uncensored…There would also be much less depressing examples: the flight of the first plane, a volcanic eruption, a solar eclipse, or a Roman sporting event. And here comes the best part: you wouldn’t have to be at these physical locations. Of course it would be more interesting if you were, but there’s no reason you couldn’t run the simulation in the middle of any empty field, park, or parking lot. This would be an educational dream: “Alright kids, watch what happens to the Spanish navy during this storm....”
If nothing else it would keep students entertained, which brings us to our next point: people aren’t going to use this for work as they are for fun.Ignoring any advanced features, this device is already a portable, full size movie projector which can be linked to watch with friends. It’s also a portable computer, mp3 player, and gaming system. You can imagine any of the examples above being more than just simulations. They could be fully interactive strategy games, where you and other players actually command troops as generals on the field, or you try to shoot down planes before they can hit buildings, etc. This is essentially something like the virtual reality that gamers have been longing for since the days of Donkey Kong, but what’s even better is that it can actually gather information from the real environment to become half real/half digital: mixed reality.
To use a familiar example, people could “carry” their Warcraft characters around with them throughout the day. While turned on, these characters would actually walk through the environment- avoiding walls, traffic, and other real life hazards [all through communication with online maps and visual environmental recognition through the user’s camera]. Waiting in line for something, or just hanging out in a public place, you might see a stranger’s character. He prompts you to fight. For two minutes the sidewalk is lit up with a battle that only the two of you can see. After beating him, you actually walk over and talk about the game- thus creating an opportunity to form a real life friendship through a digital introduction, like a walking social networking site. Coffee and Cigarettes for the 21st century and counter intuitively a way to make people less isolated from the real world.
Anthropocentricism
Strangely enough, mixed reality is in many ways actually more compelling than a complete virtual world and it will hold more lasting appeal based purely human nature. Our psychology is tied to the world we are bound to. Even our fantasies can’t escape: whether greek, hindu, old or new testament, our (no offence) mythological gods behave as humans and are concerned with our affairs. Our cartoon animals speak, love, and fight, as do the robots. Our stories, dreams, and illusions can reach a high level of abstraction, but they are always anchored to reality. There are another type which are not held to this rule, but as these leave the ground they cease to hold their social power. The fantasies of a madman might contain the most beautiful creations ever imagined, but they are either misunderstood or dismissed as irrelevant to those of us around him- what good is a social commentary on the inhabitants of Europa unless they love and hate like us? Until we can accomplish a Matrix like “brain in a vat” experience, freely manipulating all five senses and therefore experience itself, the most interesting virtual reality will be that which we paint on top of the existing world around us. This layered world will be the most important cultural development of our generation, and will affect social interaction perhaps more than anything since speech."

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