Augmented reality (AR) ‘spectacles’ or contact lenses will alter your experience of the world around you by adding computer-generated content (e.g. visual overlays or other sensory projections) ‘on top’ of what you can see, as if it is there in the real world; see Keiichi Matsuda's 'Hyper-reality' video for a vision of what that might look like. AR-tinted spectacles, not to be confused with ‘rose tinted spectacles’, which although do alter the experience of the world around you, are purely powered by 'user-generated' content and typically the kind that laments that a salad was better when it was just a soggy piece of lettuce and a squirt of salad cream pre joining the European Union; “those bloody Europeans”, coming over here with their feta cheese, sundried tomatoes, olives and actual ingredients.
Now imagine you’re in the kitchen in post-Brexit Britain and you’re trying to figure out how to maximise the nutritional value/taste potential of your lettuce. You then pop your new AR contact lenses in and suddenly layers of helpful information materialise advising of, for example, what ingredients (if you had any that is, shame!) would go really well with your lettuce to turn it in to a salad, and thus you have a practical future application/example of augmented reality.
Many predicted 2018 would be the year in which AR would gather pace, but in early 2019, and in reality, how far are we away from the implementation of AR into our everyday lives? A few dozen start ups dedicated to augmented reality recently presented their products at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, with an increasing number gearing up to sell AR glasses/lenses to consumers. Linked below are some current examples:
eMacula Augmented Reality Contact Lenses
"The human eye doesn’t like focusing on screens that are too close, and can’t focus on the foreground and background at the same time. eMacula gets around this using a combination of spectacles and contact lenses which allow the user an unimpeded view of the real world, while simultaneously delivering a clear view of rich media that is displayed on dual micro-displays embedded in the glasses."
Magic Leap One
"The Magic Leap One’s shape sits somewhere between smart glasses and virtual reality visor. It’s not bulky, but the thick band around your head stops it from looking like a pair of upcycled spectacles. While you can’t realistically fit in your own glasses underneath, you can source prescription lenses that clip magnetically onto the inside of the visor."
Project Aurora
"Chinese consumer electronics upstart Rokid, which is also active in the smart speaker and voice assistant space, showed off two different pairs of glasses at CES: A productized version of its first-generation model dubbed Rokid Glass, which includes a camera and offers facial and object recognition technology, and a new consumer prototype."
