Augment Your Reality Safely - Reflections on AR and Other Things

A bit of History: I first began to look into AR when I was doing my graduate work, which was focused on engagement techniques, influence effects, and in particular, using them to help keep girls in the STEM pipeline. I'd already learned enough to know that interaction was key to keeping interest high and internal motivation high (in academic speak it's called intrinsic motivation). That was how I defined the often overly used and overly vague term, engagement. (engagement = high interest + high intrinsic motivation). I'd been involved with a Virtual Worlds standards group, so naturally, some of my first thoughts went straight to interaction within a virtual world. A lot of researchers were thinking the same thing, with the idea of online classrooms, classrooms and field trips inside VR created worlds, and so on. Remember Google Glass? Yes, that was being used by some educators to share field trips with their students - a professor walking through a museum or factory whi...

I started with government research back in the 80s. Guess what? We were already doing heads up displays (HUDs) or in other words, augmented reality. And we were working on neural networks, expert systems, new user interfaces based on cognitive science, holographic displays and a lot of other things you wouldn't even believe. AR/VR including MR has been around a long time and seen many ups and downs. Some of it has stuck (like HUDs, machine learning, UI, UX), some of it has not (holographic displays, earlier VR attempts, any VR standards works, ...) and it is continually evolving as the technology becomes faster, easier, and more ubiquitous. So, it's important to remember that people who got their degrees in the last 5-10 years are not the only ones that has something relevant to say about AR or VR. In fact, a number of disciplines are important to both AR and VR, not just those with a technical background in it (sometimes via a degree but typically through a pa...

This post was moved from LinkedIn (now owned by Microsoft) to this Blogger site (owned by Google) because I was concerned about potential censorship (see Update regarding my mentioning here about doing a Glassdoor review) despite the fact it is simply a wish list of features that were my own ideas, inspired by a recent interview. So the move is may be unnecessary, hopefully... I've hesitated to do any posts on LinkedIn for many years - more than sharing updates, I mean. Why? Well, I wanted to have something relevant to say and wanted to do it in a way that wouldn't be seen as "simply just another rant." But I was inspired recently after a PM interview at Microsoft, not the interview itself, but rather some of the implications involved. Now, before anyone starts jumping on me saying "but the NDA you signed...!" let me stress that the NDA you sign covers not disclosing confidential information the company (via its employees or papers, etc.) may reveal ...

I decided to start a new blog based around lessons I've learned while pursuing my dream of AR for Books, meaning making it easier to augmented books with augmented reality content, such as AR illustrations. I can't promise to update it regularly. I think it's more important, in this case at least, to work on my AR engine and my AR for books demo. But when I think I have something useful to say, something useful to others, I mean, I'll do a post. (For those working in AR/VR, you know that right now, almost everyone is heads down trying to build proof of concepts. We don't want this time round with AR and VR to go the way it did in the '90s! Substance over marketing hype is called for this time!) I'll also digress and discuss other things that happened along that journey, such as Data Science. It may seem odd, but part of my AR journey was closely related to data visualization and image processing, as well as ideas about how to use AR, game engines, and...