philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Carnegie Mellon’s Light Anchors

Imagine walking down the street and having landmarks, store opening hours, Uber rider credentials and other (useful) contextual information overlaid on top of our everyday perspective. Or walking around your home and being able to determine, for instance, the live power draw of a power strip simply by looking at it. Or how much battery life is remaining on your smoke detector. Or the WiFi details of your router. Or any other useful number of “at a glance” details you might want to know.

One group working hard to achieve this vision is the Future Interfaces Groupat Carnegie Mellon University. The group has previously created futuristic technology that ranges from conductive paint that turns walls into giant touchpads to a software update for smartwatches which allows them to know exactly what your hands are doing and respond accordingly. In other words, FIG anticipates the way we’ll be interfacing with technology and the world around us tomorrow (or, well, maybe the day after that).

In its latest work, the group has developed something called LightAnchors. This is a technique for spatially anchoring data in augmented reality. In essence, it creates a prototype tagging system that precisely places labels on top of everyday scenes. It marks up the real world like a neat, user friendly schematic. That’s important. After all, to “augment” means to make something better by adding to it; not to crowd it with unclear, messy popups and banner ads like a 1998 website. Augmented reality needs something like this if it’s ever going to live up to its promise.

“LightAnchors is sort of the AR equivalent of barcodes or QR Codes, which are everywhere,” Chris Harrison, head of Carnegie Mellon’s Future Interfaces Group, told Digital Trends. “Of course, barcodes don’t do a whole lot other than providing a unique ID for looking up price [and things like that.] LightAnchors can be so much more, allowing devices to not only say who and what they are, but also share live information and even interfaces. Being able to embed information right into the world is very powerful.”

See the full story here: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/lightanchors-carnegie-mellon/