Robert Rice: Augmented Vision and the Decade of Ubiquity

Robert Rice: Augmented Vision and the Decade of Ubiquity

Robert Rice wrote a very inspiring article on Curious Raven today. In it, he discusses the marvelous future we are facing and some of the hurdles ahead:

The Decade of Ubiquity is defined as the next ten years where every aspect of our lives will be permeated by digital, mobile, media, data, information, augmented, virtual, and so forth. It will be everywhere and accessible almost instantly. Everything will be connected, labled, monitored, tracked, tagged, and interactive to some degree or another. We will break away from the desk, we will throw away our monitors, and our children will laugh at how large our IPhones are. They will struggle with how we ever managed to get work done with “windows” “webpages” and keyboards. They will be unable to fathom the concept of vinyl disks, typewriters, and landlines. But it all starts, and accelerates, during this next decade. Imagine everything that happened in the last decade, and multiply it. You haven’t seen anything yet. The next decade will make the last one pale in comparison.

He then calls for action:

The world is nearing another dramatic paradigm shift and explosive growth in technology and economics, but we need to wake up. Demand more, better, stronger, faster, smaller. The future is ours to invent. Don’t be satisfied with mediocrity or lazy development.

I would like to suggest another call for action. Augmented reality and ubiquitous computing are coming fast our way. As Rice notes, they will change almost every aspect of our daily life. We cannot afford that the infrastructure for such a revolution will be controlled by a few, whether those are giant corporations such as Microsoft or Google or small companies like Rice's Neogence. For augmented reality to be truly successful, we need an open environment, where developers, artists and visionaries can create applications without total dependence on the infrastructure providers. As web developers are not committed to routers manufacturers, AR developers should be free to create whatever they deem right, without the prior approval of the patent holders and infrastructure overloads. We need an OpenAR initiative, and we need it now.