Innovation: How cellphones will enhance reality

Innovation is our regular column that highlights the latest emerging technological ideas and where they may lead.

Despite decades of hype, virtual reality has never really managed to live up to, well, reality. But new applications that blend real and virtual worlds via the medium of a smartphone may have the missing ingredient needed to make the technology take off.

Instead of completely immersing a person in a virtual environment, augmented or mixed reality involves adding digital features to the world they see around them.

Changing the world in this way requires drawing on nearly every faculty the latest smartphones possess – camera, GPS, tilt sensors, digital compass and wireless broadband – to determine exactly what is being looked at, and to find and display relevant extra data.


Hitchhikers' guide?
So what are the advantages of augmenting your reality? Simply, the technology allows you to point a phone at an object and see an enhanced version of reality on the screen – whether a mountain labelled with its height, a person tagged with their name, or celestial objects properly labelled in the night sky.

An application called Enkin developed by two German researchers for phones using Google's Android operating system provides a straightforward example. It acts like an enhanced satnav system, helping you to find nearby services or points of interest.


Nokia's Mobile Augmented Reality Applications project does a similar thing, drawing its annotations from known points of interest in the satnav software found in Nokia smartphones.

Despite some impressive demos, both these systems are still in development. But another, the Wikitude AR Travel Guide, is already available as an app for Android phones.

By drawing on Wikipedia it can label sites in the phone's view, such as castles, or augment mountain peaks with their altitude, like a kind of universal guide book.


Playing tag
That's powerful, but there is more to come, especially when these apps start to tap into social websites. Wikitude can already tap into location-based contents of Qype, an online user-based review service, allowing people to stroll down a street and read reviews of restaurants, bars or hotels just by pointing the phone's camera at them.

And now Nokia is taking this further by getting your phone to augment people as well as places and objects. Users will be offered a service similar to Google's Latitude software. When the software is running on the phone, icons will appear next to anyone nearby who is also running the program to show if you have mutual friends or common interests.


Nokia researchers are also exploring ways to augment a cellphone user's reality to reveal past actions of others. One spooky example is that you could be alerted with a vibration to the fact that a friend recently passed by – a bit like brushing shoulders with a ghost.

So, rather than stumbling around wearing virtual reality headsets, viewing a digital world through our smartphones takes the technology in a fundamentally more practical direction. By seeing what we see and adding to our knowledge of the world around us, AR-capable phones offer real benefits that are only just starting to be explored.

USB 3.0 Speeds Up Performance on External Devices

The USB connector has been one of the greatest success stories in the history of computing, with more than 2 billion USB-connected devices sold to date. But in an age of terabyte hard drives, the once-cool throughput of 480 megabits per second that a USB 2.0 device can realistically provide just doesn't cut it any longer.

What is it? USB 3.0 (aka "SuperSpeed USB") promises to increase performance by a factor of 10, pushing the theoretical maximum throughput of the connector all the way up to 4.8 gigabits per second, or processing roughly the equivalent of an entire CD-R disc every second. USB 3.0 devices will use a slightly different connector, but USB 3.0 ports are expected to be backward-compatible with current USB plugs, and vice versa. USB 3.0 should also greatly enhance the power efficiency of USB devices, while increasing the juice (nearly one full amp, up from 0.1 amps) available to them. That means faster charging times for your iPod--and probably even more bizarre USB-connected gear like the toy rocket launchers and beverage coolers that have been festooning people's desks.

When is it coming? The USB 3.0 spec is nearly finished, with consumer gear now predicted to come in 2010. Meanwhile, a host of competing high-speed plugs--DisplayPort, eSATA, and HDMI--will soon become commonplace on PCs, driven largely by the onset of high-def video. Even FireWire is looking at an imminent upgrade of up to 3.2 gbps performance. The port proliferation may make for a baffling landscape on the back of a new PC, but you will at least have plenty of high-performance options for hooking up peripherals.
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