Phone designers to improve reality
Rik Myslewski of The Register reports on augmented reality on mobile devices:
Future phones will recognize buildings and people by sight and replace reality with something better. They’ll also have roll-out HD displays. Or projectors. Or they’ll dock with your PC’s display.
At least, that’s the vision of some visual-computing visionaries at this week’s Multicore Expo, inspired by the graphic and computing power of high-performance multicore embedded processors that will power tomorrow’s smartphones.
Kari Pulli, who heads the Visual Computing and User Interfaces research team at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California, described a prototype phone that his company has developed that visually recognizes buildings and people. The object, as he puts it, is to “make the device aware of its surroundings and react to it; to connect the digital and real world.”
It seems interesting how a phone would be able to ‘recognize’ buildings and people by sight – as to say we don’t need to really search what we are looking for, as the phone sometime in the near future will figure it out for us. Hence by making the phone “aware of its surrounding and react to it” it would connect the digital and the real world. For me, that seem to be like taking one step forward and and two steps back since we would loose even more touch with the human aspects of just being more human and less ‘computerized.’Some aspects of the everyday life needs to be personal and free from to many digital devices – in my opinion. Otherwise, can we really live our entire life out of just a phone?