Augmented reality marching forward

Occasionally people are questioning those fancy 3D Vista examples, or anything beyond today's 2D graphical interfaces will easy man-machine interaction. And, to be honest, it is not always - or even close to impossible - to predict how most people will interact with their PCs a decade from now.

Microsoft Research Projects recently presented at the Siggraph conference offer a peek into such a future, where augmented reality and ubiquitous computing may change how we think about PCs and computers.

Navigate the webs pictures in 3D

Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth is a collaboration between the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. Photosynth analyzes large numbers of photos and arranges them into a 3D context. Photos of objects, or places. So, for example a collection of photos of Rome is automatically analyzed and and arranged - similar to "stitching" software, but this time in 3D space.

Not too far in the future, Photosynth could crawl the entire web, try to find similarities in pictures, and arrange those pictures into a 3D navigatable structure. A web based prototype of such a 3D picture browser is planned for later this year. Watch the videos what Photosynth does today. 

Play Anywhere

Augmented reality will also conquer your desktop. So, better clean up that clobbered desktop space now.  Andy Wilson of Microsoft Research has built a prototype of a desktop projector/camera system that lets you interact with your PC by placing objects on your (real world) desktop, or simply by hand gestures. No gloves, mice, pens or other pointing devices are necessary.

 Place a smartphone on the desktop, it will be recognized, pictures extracted (Bluetooth) and you can instantly manipulate them with your bare hands.

Scroll and zoom the globe (an application using the programmability features of local.live.com).

This is how the device looks today. A video showing this awesome technology has been published on 10.