Augmented Reality

Two quick links:

The first, via Alan Liu on Humanist, Magic Book:

A Magic Book looks like a regular storybook with colorful pages and simple text. When readers look at the same pages wearing lightweight head mounted displays (HMD), the pictures pop off the page and come to life as three-dimensional animated virtual scenes. By touching a switch on the HMD, readers can fly into the virtual scene and freely explore the immersive environment. Several readers can gather around a single Magic Book and experience it together. Wearing HMDs, each reader can view AR scenes from their own perspective or fly into the immersive world and see each other represented as avatars in the same virtual scene. Readers that remain in the AR setting have a God’s eye view of their fellow readers as miniature avatars in the virtual scene before them.

The second is called Entertaible:

The Entertaible concept is a tabletop gaming platform that marries traditional multi-player board and computer games in a uniquely simple and intuitive way. Entertaible comprises a 30-inch horizontal LCD, sophisticated touch screen-based multi-object position detection, and all supporting control electronics. It allows the players to engage in a new class of electronic games which combines the features of computer gaming, such as dynamic playing fields and gaming levels, with the social interaction and tangible playing pieces, such as pawns and dies, of traditional board games.

What’s immediately striking about both devices, I suppose, is their appeal to an embodied, social dimension of computing. Is this a fundamental departure from life on the screen?