Net Gamblings

If you haven’t been paying attention, over the last couple of months, the “buzz” over “augmented reality” has been building. It seems likely that it’s going to be one of those topics you hear a lot about in 2010, so get ready for it now. The basic concept is that you’ll be able to overlay digital information on the real world, and conceptually, it could be really cool. If you had heads-up displays or a contact lens, it could actually be quite useful. The concept itself isn’t new. A video from five years ago shows that people have been working on the concept for quite some time:

Yet, in the last few months, it’s reached new levels of buzz, in part due to the fact that new augmented reality apps for mobile phones have started showing up. Some of these are cool, some are gimmicky — but all are pretty early in development. It’s going to take some time before they’re really useful. There are also plans for augmented reality music videos.

But that isn’t stopping some folks from trying to get ahead of the curve in jumping on the augmented reality bandwagon. Unfortunately, the end result seems kinda gimmicky and useless — more for show, rather than to do anything useful. Last week, all the buzz was about singer John Mayer releasing an augmented reality video.