Good books on Augmented Reality?

May 10, 2010 4:43 AM

Are there any good books on augmented-reality/mediated-reality for the interested layman?

I'm looking for a book that talks about the field of augmented-reality, mediated-reality and virtual-reality as it exists today. Ideally it would talk about the history of the relevant technologies and fields and cover the major milestone projects in an interesting way.

It would be nice if it also gave a realistic projection into the future, speculating from an informed perspective on which technologies are just around the corner and which ones are likely to remain science fiction for the foreseeable future.

With the advent of smartphones, this technology has become interesting and real so quickly and I'd like to read a good overview/analysis of it. I'm thinking of a book in the vein of James Gleick or Paul Davies.

This search turns up a handful of books, but they all seem to either be technical books directed at people working in the field, or to be woefully out of date.

I'm starting to think that the actual book I'm looking for doesn't exist, but I'd be thrilled if someone could point me in the direction of any recent books that devote even a couple of chapters to the field.

posted by 256 to Writing & Language (5 answers total)

Certainly in the "woefully out of date" category is Myron Kreuger's "Artificial Reality II" - from back in 1991 - and in this book he mentions concepts and demos which go back to the 60s. I only mention this because augmented reality is an idea with a long history. If you want to see where the field is going to go it is useful to see where people thought it was going to go.
posted by rongorongo at 5:40 AM on May 10, 2010

If you're interested in fiction, Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End is an interesting take.
posted by beowulf573 at 7:39 AM on May 10, 2010

[I am a grad student in new media; I am not studying augmented reality] The field of "augmented reality" is so new that you're going to find more about it in conference proceedings and journals than books. I can think of several academic AR projects of various sorts, and one or two relatively simple commercial apps (eg, "project an arrow to the nearest subway station overlayed on your iPhone camera view) that might be considered AR depending on your threshold, but very few things that are mature. I don't think the field is stable enough to have a book, yet.

It would help if you narrowed your definition of AR, too -- ie, do you only mean things that use a HMD to overlay graphics on an otherwise "normal" view of the world? Would ubiquitous use of QR / 2d barcodes without the overlaid-on-reality bit count? What about the recent MIT project that uses a micro-projector to project overlays onto products in the store, etc? Would Hiroshi Ishii's ambient tangibles, or for that matter the Ambient Orb, count, for you?
posted by Alterscape at 7:57 AM on May 10, 2010

Also in fiction would be cstross' Halting State.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:07 AM on May 10, 2010

There are none (that I know of). No one knows enough to write a book yet, and shit is changing so quickly, both in practice and theory, that I imagine even a rush job of a book would be half-worthless by the time it hit shelves. I'd second Alterscape's advice and check out conferences and journals ... or even poke around online and see what you can dig up. Give it a little bit of time; people are busy asking questions exponentially faster than they're providing answers. (Quite the opposite of my own track record here.)
posted by Damn That Television at 6:19 PM on May 10, 2010