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Picture this: As your eyes alight for the first time on a skyscraper in a foreign cityscape, a disembodied voice whispers in your ear the phone number of a posh bar on the top floor.
Or this: You have been spotted on the street by an old friend whose name suddenly eludes you. But even before there is time to shake hands, a glance at your smartphone reveals her identity and the date of your last encounter.
Welcome to the world of augmented reality, the here-and-now enhancement of everyday experience through virtual, interactive technology.
Prototypes of both of these applications -- based on the novel use of eye-tracking tools -- were presented last weekend at the inaugural Augmented Human International Conference.Over two days, engineers and scientists gathered in the French Alps ski resort of Megeve unveiled cutting-edge research on boosting human perception with information from the Internet, customized databases, or even biofeedback from our own brains.
A team of researchers from the Telecommunications Research Center in Vienna decided to take a state-of-the-art eye tracker designed for web-use analysis out of the laboratory and onto the street.
They hooked up the device -- with one camera trained on the user's eye, and another on the scene being observed -- to a smart phone with a built-in compass and global positioning system (GPS), to get a fix on the user's orientation and location.
They added sensors that show whether one was looking up or down, and attached the whole kit -- designed to navigate urban landscapes -- to a bicycle helmet.
Closing one's eyes for two seconds triggers a request for information about the building, bridge or monument in view.
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