Augmented Reality is currently being developed because of its usefulness in everyday life, imagine you’re someone with a very busy and hectic lifestyle, with Augmented Reality you could have a device built in to your prescription spectacles that allows you to walk to work or catch a train whilst accessing your emails and surfing the internet viewing all this through your the spectacle lenses. Obviously Augmented Reality has much greater uses and can be used in just about any scenario but what really interests me is when you apply AR to the gaming industry. I’ve recently written an article about the development of AR contact lenses, imagine as a gamer going to a local forest, quarry, beach or just about anywhere on your own or with friends and being able to play a first person shooter with real world surroundings wearing these AR lenses. In theory you could be playing a game like Halo and have crazy alien characters jumping out from behind real world trees and buildings firing lasers and throwing grenades at you. Augmented Reality could even reach a state where it is able to enhance and alter the appearance of the real world around you to make it look for example like the world of Pandora from James Cameron’s recent blockbuster hit film Avatar. To be able to walk around a beautifully enhanced version of an area that doesn’t really hold any interesting features in the real world would be incredible and people could escape into their own utopia whilst for example sitting on a bus. The possibilities with this technology really are endless and not just in gaming.

Augmented Reality as a concept really does start to become interesting when you combine it with other technologies. As we’ve seen from demonstrations of Xbox’s upcoming innovation Project Natal voice recognition technology has come on leaps and bounds and is starting to be applied effectively to video games. Although voice recognition has been used in the past it has been clumsy and frustrating to work with and now we’re really starting to see the human voice become a feasible control option. If we were to combine voice and facial recognition with Augmented Reality it is easy to see the potential that Augmented Reality has to providing an immersive gaming experience within a real world environment. With this combination of technologies you could in theory be able to have two way communication with high definition computer generated characters within your augmented world opening up a whole new avenue of potential in how we play games. I like to think of the experience as something similar to paintball shooting. Paintball shooting in essence is a role playing activity as the people involved in a game are recreating a scenario you would find in warfare. Augmented Reality can provide a similar experience without the need for paintballs and safety gear and instead of shooting real people you could be shooting real people and virtual characters with virtual ammunition. You’d probably still need some kind of gun controller in the example of a first person shooter but it wouldn’t fire any ammunition in the real world, just the augmented environment.

Obviously this is all conjecture and most of what we write on this site is. I imagine this idea would work by connecting the AR lenses wirelessly to a portable console (possibly built into your mobile phone as we are talking about the future here) and obviously you would have audio delivered to a pair of wireless or bluetooth headphones that also provided a built in microphone for communicating with the virtual and real world characters.

In recent years video games have received a great deal of bad press in terms of how it is believed they help prevent the social, physical and mental development of young people and in some cases you would have to agree that this is true. The thing I love most about the potential with Augmented Reality is that it will mean young people will be outdoors more, socialising with friends, learning the importance of teambuilding, exercising and basically developing the skills and experience that are required later in life. The truth is Augmented Reality could be used everywhere to help make life easier and to improve the quality of life, we will probably see it in education, healthcare, security, design, manufacturing, sales, teambuilding and the list goes on endlessly. Augmented Reality clearly has unlimited potential and I hope some of the possible developments I have outlined in this article will come to fruition along with millions of others, but I guess time will tell. Please leave your own ideas, comments, thoughts and suggestions on how you could picture this technology changing the video game industry or of course whether you disagree with my ideas and believe AR is unlikely to become mainstream .

This concept may seem generations away but just by looking at Xbox’s upcoming control system Project Natal you can see that already many of the technologies required for the virtual reality experience are there. Voice recognition has been developed to an advanced stage, motion sensor technology is now highly advanced and computer graphics have reached a stage where they’re close to photorealism. It again comes down to cost of implementation and the amount of time and money it would take to develop a new gaming platform of this magnitude and apply it to video game arcades. It would be a big gamble to take a project of this description on and this gaming experience obviously wouldn’t be available to everyone as the VRcades would have to be located in areas with a high population density to be profitable.

It is highly unlikely that we’ll see anything like this being developed in the immediate future but I believe VR technology will be the saving grace of the video game arcade and will provide an experience far superior to the one you’re able to get from a home console or computer. Eventually I’m sure VR will fully integrate itself into the home and advancements in technology will provide an experience similar to the VRcade but I imagine a fully immersive VR system for the home is decades away and that is a whole different article to write. I shall be keeping a close eye on VR technology and technologies that can be applied to VR as I’m almost certain that VR is the inevitable future for the video game industry.

I believe that this is a very interesting concept and if this way of learning is proven successful it could change or at least offer an interesting set of options for schools all round the world. At the age these young people are, combining education with video games seems like a great solution to extending their attention spans. What I also like about this project is the way they aren’t throwing out conventional methods of learning all together they are simply using the technology available to them to enhance the learning experience and allowing the students to take a practical hands-on approach through video game technology. It’ll be interesting to see how the students perform as they have to take New York’s standardised tests like everyone else in the state but I predict that you’ll see these young people excel.