Augmented reality the day after tomorrow

A girl, looking through augmented reality at a passerby, sees four markers on top of her that indicate a woman’s coat, scarf, leggings and shoes:

_{Frankly speaking, this illustration makes you wonder in bewilderment: a passerby is wearing a coat and a warm scarf, and the girls on the left are in light, open dresses. Which of them is dressed for the weather? But we will leave this discrepancy on the conscience of the photographer.}

Stretching out her left hand, the observer activates a coat marker, which begins to glow in light green and shows the name, price tag, rating, number of satisfied and dissatisfied customer reviews. In augmented reality, an orange line is immediately drawn, indicating the direction to the store where such clothes can be purchased, as well as the distance (quarter mile).

This everyday scene from the near future is just one of the illustrations to the article “Your life in 2020,” published in Forbes magazine following the results of the interaction of many experts: designers, futurologists and journalists. One of those designers (Sam Martin) dedicated a blog entry to her that Bruce Sterling referred to .
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Here so the information in a digital epoch scatters.

Now let's look at a couple more interesting futuristic pictures about augmented reality, which (according to experts) will be shown by mobile phones, special glasses or even contact lenses.

In front of you is a sporty man who is monitoring his health:



As you can see, one glance at a hamburger thrown through AR glasses reveals to the consumer all the negative effects of modern fast food - and even tells you how much time you have to spend on the treadmill in order to lose excess calories.

And this is how the forecasters of the future imagine the conversation of typical Californians of 2020:



Through the social AR network, you can see their names, surnames, cities, relationships, rating (or is it the number of children? ...), the number of friends, as well as “whuffies”.

Generally speaking, “whuffie” is a term from Down And Out In the Magic Kingdom; there it means something like karma on a social network, a kind of generalized indicator of public respect. In the future, described by Doctorow, “whuffies” (if you like, “simpashki”) completely replaced money and the economy: the provision of mutual services is performed not for the sake of monetization, but for the sake of sympathy.

And is it possible around us — in the present — to discern any such trends (trends) that would lead us precisely to such a future?

Well, in any case, in the current April a new social network AR appears , a hyperlink to which also threw Bruce Sterling. The network is called Tagwhat and is built on fast free access to a variety of AR-tags (AR tags), suspended over the real world by augmented reality users, either from their mobile phones or through a cartographic interface on desktop computers. Such shortcuts can contain multimedia, URLs, phone numbers and e-mail addresses - all this is available for launching (transition, viewing, calling, writing) from mobile phones.

The social part of Tagwhat is built on the ability of users to “follow” (follow) the “streams” (streams) of AR-labels of each other. (Something like “followers” ​​on Twitter.) It also provides for the possibility of leaving comments on the labels in augmented reality. AR restricted shortcuts are possible (for friends only). Each user will also have his own (and not geolocated) media center and chatnik (means of receiving and sending instant messages).

This AR grid can also be used (and used) by museum directors, teachers, parents, writers, shop owners, and so on.

Here is their short video for clarity:

_{Probably, it is better to watch it directly on YouTube : the video is widescreen, and the video player on Habrahabr is not widescreen, unlike YouTube.}

Some kind of wildest cross between Layar, Twitter and Facebook, that's what I think.

Recognition of images and faces are not there yet, as well as whuffies. But this will not be the case.