In the News: Eric Klopfer talks to Boston Globe about augmented reality

“There’s a big difference between looking down at a device and reading, ‘Stand in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, face north, now turn to the right . . .’ and looking at the real world through a screen that augments reality by simply overlaying information on top of it."

Eric Klopfer (at left), developer of two C4FCM-funded projects Timelab 2100 and NOT::Boston spoke earlier this month with the Boston Globe about how to improve on reality, mainly through iPhones and phones running Google's Android operating system.

Lots of companies and researchers are working on so-called augmented reality, most commonly pitched to the public as a way of overlaying data on digital maps---think of being a tourist in Rome and being able to see an overlay of now-lost buildings.

But Klopfer pointed out to the Globe that augmented reality's potential has been accelerating lately into other uses:

"Over the last three months we seem to have reached the threshold of what was recently out of reach [. . .] We’re on the cusp of a whole new era in augmented reality." In fact, Ramesh Raskar of the Media Lab's Camera Culture group has been developing Bokode, a barcode-like method of making information available to anyone with a camera. If that camera is happens to be networked--as mobile phone cameras are--anyone could get tons more information about the object they happen to be standing in front of, whether it's a painting in a gallery, a person at a conference, or a house in a historical part of town.