So this is really cool.  There’s a little company operating out of a warehouse in Chippendale (believe it or not – the old Wedding Circle building – scene of some pretty great parties in the past) I’ve been following for a while now – they’re called ‘Explore Engage’ and are developing what looks like some really promising Augmented Reality technologies, including their own glasses – a challenge to the (so-far seemingly mostly vapourware) ‘Google Glass’ project.  They have a very serious pedigree with AR tech and what appears to be some pretty happening point-cloud 3d environment mapping algorithms.

Anyway, they’ve just set up a crowd-funding project (via Pozible) to realize their glasses prototype.  And all this from a little startup in Chippendale.  Nice.  I’m looking forward to seeing how they progress.

I’m fascinated by this technology.  Not only for it’s technical challenges (there are some very tricky elements of the human vision system to overcome using a display this close to the eye), but also for it’s huge potential.  I mean the list of possible use cases is enormous.  So I’m really curious about how their technology deals with things such as the correspondence problem and fools the disparity-selective receptive fields to fire in the way that they would with a tangible object in space.  The way we process vision generally and stereo vision in particular is pretty involved – and it’s hard to fool.

My only concern is the ‘solution in need of a problem’ aspect.  This is terrific technology – and the medical/government/military (shudder) applications are certainly promising – but really – I feel this field requires the ‘killer-app’.  The one single application that has broad consumer appeal – the simply demonstrable functionality that people just go ‘yeah – I want that’.   I have some ideas about this – but… well… I’m keeping them to myself right now.  J

In the meantime – check out the Pozible campaign and throw ‘em some cash eh?