• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, December 12, 2011

When Google first introduced its Android operating system and the G1 phone that ran it several years ago, I included it in a college lecture I was giving on emerging technology. Before I began, 1 tired-eyed young man in the front row was polishing off a bottle of Diet Coke. I asked him to hold onto it for me to use during the lecture.

As I wound down the talk, I ended with what was then a bold prediction that mobile platforms would do what two decades of the Web had failed to do: activate data in our everyday lives. My argument then (and now) is that mobile provides the long-awaited connective tissue between the database we have been building for decades online and the real worlds where context makes that information mission critical in real time.

Consulting traffic reports at your desktop is all well and good before you drive home, but it becomes invaluable when you have to decide which exit to take. The same holds true for product reviews, local resource information, movie times, etc. At the time the first iteration of Red Laser demonstrated what I meant on the side of a Diet Coke bottle. It showed the class not only what was in the bottle, but where it could be gotten closest to their class for the lowest price. This demonstration woke up even the hungover kids in the back. 

Around this same time, Mac Funamizu was already thinking way ahead of the curve with a design he called the Looking Glass tablet that took AR to a new level of functionality. Business Insider called attention the other day to this old winner of the 2009 Red Dot design competition in Singapore. But I found it so compelling and apropos of this coming year of AR development I had to pass it on.

The fully illustrated gallery of concepts shows a future search tool in the form of a tablet that feels like a pane of transparent glass one lays atop a scene to render information. Some of the AR-like functions imaged here are amazing. There is everything from mapping onto a scene specific directions to someone’s office to graphical representations of a product’s ingredients and nutrition info through image recognition. As a researcher I love the idea of laying an AR layer atop a printed page in order to translate text, copy and search items and save material, simply by tapping and highlighting it on the tablet’s view of the text.

I have no doubt AR will become much more interesting next year. As consumers got used to basic ways of connecting physical worlds and data together via 2D codes and mobile mapping, the user base is getting ready to leverage the next level of mobile sophistication. In imagining what that augmented reality will be, we could do worse than look backward through the Looking Glass.