augmented reality Archives | Page 3 of 3

(Image from Metaverse One on TweetPhoto).

I’m not sure if this is just a mockup or an actual working prototype (the latter would surprise me), but this “interactive educational augmented reality medical app” is a great concept. I found it via Bruce Sterling, and it reminds me of some of the stuff from his State of the Future 2010:

If patients end up doing their own diagnoses by aggregating patient data, using Web 2.0 style collective intelligence, and especially if they then start suing doctors who make demonstrable, dumb mistakes, the practice of medicine will be wrecked. Not improved, wrecked. It’ll be hugely damaged, in the same way that the music business was damaged by Napster, and newspapers were wrecked by Craigslist, or the Democratic Party was outmaneuvered and tamed by some Chicago guy who had social media and a digital fundraising machine.

Doctors do make dumb mistakes all the time. That’s the nature of a knowledge guild that restricts vital knowledge to a professional clique.

We didn’t want amateur brain surgeons because they are dangerous quacks without medical ethics. But there’s no physical reason why one couldn’t have amateur brain surgeons with instructables off Wikipedia,
and no reason why theses jaspers couldn’t do a sort-of-okay job, too. Not perfect, but cheap and fast and distributed and upgradeable, like Wikipedia compared to Encyclopedia Britannica.

That’s network culture. If medicine gets the big wikipedia treatment, you don’t get a computer-literate doctor, you get a doctor-literate web activist.

Strange and scary to think about – the current health care debate could be obsolete before we know it, with a whole new host of controversies to consider.

I’ve been thinking that wearable computing, ubicomp, and augmented reality won’t be very useful for existing computing tasks (designing, typing, book-keeping, data analysis, etc.) but will be useful in previously un-computerized jobs such as carpentry, bike messaging, and cooking. Wouldn’t it be useful for a carpenter’s goggles to calculate measurements and so forth while they worked? And wouldn’t it be nice for a cook to be able to see a recipe dangling in their field of vision instead of having to glance at a recipe? FedEx drivers or truckers would have the benefit of dash-based navigation systems, and existing GPS based handhelds would be adequate for foot-based delivery, but a bike messenger would have greater utility for a wearable navigation system.

For instance, here’s an activity that doesn’t usually involve computers: a wearable computing device for fisherpeople (via boing boing)

And by the way, here’s Microsoft’s new, ugly, always-on camera neckless:

I love the idea, but it’s even uglier than the MSN direct watch. Via 21f

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