This week, castAR began shipping its new augmented reality glasses, which raised over $1 million on Kickstarter last year. Augmented reality involves digitally overlaying the image of the real world with a virtual display. The glasses were developed by Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson, former engineers at Valve, the video game development company. If their background is any indication, the glasses are expected to be an innovative, top-tier product. The glasses are active shutter and feature a camera for input and projector for 3D images. They have even added a virtual reality component, which is accessible via a clip-on to the normal glasses.
After seeing this, I began to wonder how glasses such as these will affect modern society. Two years ago, Google released this video about its new Google Glass. As cool as the video was/is and as excited as people got about the concept, Google did not release the first Google Glasses commercially until months later, and unfortunately, Google Glass has yet to live up to the concept video. So, can castAR's new glasses reach the potential of Google's original release video? If so, how will these glasses be received by the public?
The earliest ideas of application of these devices was typically for things like video games and movies. Virtual reality helmets would allow users to place themselves directly inside the games they were playing. Similarly, audiences could truly experience being inside the movie they were watching. The ideas of reading and responding to emails may have been thought up, but were not nearly as relevant twenty five years ago why.en the earliest virtual reality devices were being discussed. Today, however, augmented reality has become a much more realistic, and, in some ways more desirable, concept than virtual reality.
As the Frontline documentary showed us last week, social media has become an increasingly important pinnacle of society, especially among teens and young adults. The ability to check one's email at every second of the day, and be notified immediately upon receiving a new message, has become a necessity for most businessmen. Interacting with others online, whether through email or social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, is now required for teenagers to be socially accepted by their peers, celebrities to reach the widest audience possible, politicians to stay up to date on the latest news, and businessmen to monitor the desires of the market.
The age of the smartphone has already increased the outreach of social media exponentially. So, will a device such as the castAR glasses increase this further, or give way to an entirely new form of social media or interaction? Personally, I don't believe that social media as we currently know it will change very much over the next several years. However, the way it is used and viewed, definitely might be. I fully expect these glasses, or maybe even the Google Glass, to become just as popular as the iPhone within the next ten years. They will allow users to be notified even more quickly, almost instantaneously, of tweets, status updates, and instagram posts, because instead of missing your phone's ringtone or vibrate go off, a person would literally have to have their eyes closed the entire time a notification was present.
This, of course, presents many other issues, such as the idea of "Google Glass-ing and Driving," detecting when someone may be taking photographs illegally, etc. It is clear that devices such as these have the potential to revolutionize the world of social media and digital interactivity, but also the laws we have in place and the general organization and functioning of our government and way of life.
Article:
castAR team ships out first pair of AR glasses, more to follow soon
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