Making the Invisible ,Visible -- Augmented Reality Solutions

Large Searchable Datasets about the world are being stored online- and the data flow is increasing to a flood. This includes web content (crawled , indexed, ranked by Google). Public records( by many organizations including LexisNexis). In addition people are dumping personal content - into the Cloud via emails and postings on Facebook , Twitter and other Social Sites and Forums. As new sensors and cameras are developed - even more data will be captured and stored.

Now raw data by itself is sometimes hard to interpret and therefore it's usefulness is diminished -- But when it is tagged and annotated - it's like the raw stuff has been nicely packaged. The tagging makes it useful - because now it is searchable and linkable to the appropriate context.

This is what Augmented Reality solutions are about. You point your iPhone camera at a scene and the GPS gives you the location, the accelerometer /compass gives you which way you are looking. Based on this -- information about the location you are at (restaurants, buildings) can be retrieved and superimposed on the scene you are looking at -- or annotated.

Suddenly what you are looking at , has been enhanced by stored data for a richer experience.

In a sense , this is 'Just-In- Time' knowledge . And the applications for this are immense:

In maintenance, in negotiations(Imagine having a cloud of information projected on your tablet - about the people in the room you are talking to! ) and in education. Point a camera at an insect ,press a button get and get an annotated tagged cloud of information -superimposed on the image.

Certainly makes you look smarter doesn't it? What was invisible(stored in another place) is now made available,visible and more useful because it was retrieved and placed in context.

In an earlier post , I had mentioned that - making pollution visible - would help in tackling it. And there appears to be an app that does just that. Pollution sensor measurements are plotted into the scene you are looking at.. and suddenly the pollution in an area is made more real.

Progress? Well come to think of it, isn't retrieving information and putting it in context , what the human brain does?