I'm Jon Olick. I make shiny things. I simplify.


I presented Sparse Voxel Octrees at Siggraph 2008.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Augmented Reality, Boom or Bust?

There has been a lot of excitement brewing recently, and will be even more so in the coming year about Augmented Reality. Quite frankly, the technology just isn't there yet. The most advanced piece of augmented reality tech we have is Xbox 360 Kinect, and even it IMO leaves a lot to be desired. Don't get me wrong, its an amazing achievement! I think we will have a boom for the next few years in augmented reality will be followed shortly after by a bust when people realize that its just not what they expected. After the bust though maybe 5 years from now, maybe a little longer, we will have a true and lasting boom for augmented reality. Computer Vision is still in its infancy. There is an incredible amount of improvement that will come. I look forward to it. Here is a short list of what I think computers should do better and/or faster than people with the aid of advanced, in some cases yet to be invented Computer Vision tech:
1) Security Monitoring (this would also incorporate various parts of advanced AI)
2) 2D to 3D conversions (much to be desired in this area)
3) Automatic Driving (this is nowhere near ready for prime time, no matter what googlers think)
4) Targeted In-store advertising a la Minority Report. (I'm going to hate this, but this would be a billion dollar business, hello google...)
5) Real-time Augmented Reality OCR of names of places, menus at restaurants, etc. When I'm in Japan, I want to see things in English. (mobile phones aren't fast enough to do this entirely ATM)
6) A vacuum cleaning robot which doesn't act like a drunken sailor.
7) An automatic fan which points at me, wherever I go.
8) A computer which would automatically log me in, because it knows who is sitting at the computer. (lol, fooling it with a picture... priceless)
9) etc...

There are probably hundreds of great ideas where computer vision will revolutionize technology. This is only the beginning.

1 comment:

  1. Also, yes, I know that there is security monitoring with computer vision already. I've heard that it makes lots of mistakes and requires lots of manual interaction and verifications.

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