Humour

Augmenting the real world

T A Balasubramanian on how to get the real world boosted with virtual information

Out for a short break, you, Papyrus Bytewala, CIO of Baffle Corporation, find yourself wandering around at the Techno Over-exposition of Geeks and Gizmos for Lazy Enterprises (TOGGLE), accompanied by Danny DeVito, CTO, the biped walking humanoid.

Not surprisingly, you discover your old friend, Nawab Ghoda Ghallstone, Junior stationed at his new booth. The colourfully dressed founder and CEO of Ghallstone Labs, as always, turns on a radiant smile.

“Ah, there you are, Papyrus. And, of course, Danny is with you. We meet again in this wonder world for IT goodies, eh?” he bellows, shaking your hand. He is dressed in a bright red sherwani, and on his head is a matching red topi with a black tassel. “Ghallstone is always ahead of the crowd. We bring to you the awesome power of BooRealis.”

“And what, may I ask, does this atrociously named thing stand for?” you ask.

With a flourish, the nawab turns and points to a huge banner behind him that says ‘Make the Real World Come Alive’ and under it is an eye-catching photographic street side scene. In the picture too, is an attractive, athletic girl with wavy brown hair wearing a red tracksuit—and a large logo that spells ‘BooRealis’ on her chest.

“Wow!” says DeVito with a whistle. “That’s some real world scenery we don’t see too often in Baffle.”

“What we can see is that she’s holding up a cellphone in her hand which seems to have a frame of the same street scene in front of her,” you say. “So BooRealis is your answer to Lara Croft?”

“Ah, gentlemen, I see that you two have remarkable powers of observation,” laughs the nawab.

“Well, nabob, would you care to tell us why the real world might need another Lara Croft? Of course, Danny here would have an exciting answer of his own,” you say, wryly.

“I do, I do,” says DeVito, looking dreamily at the display.

“Ha, ha. But to get back to our new groundbreaking product. What you see running on BooRealis—the cellphone, I mean, not the model—is an example of what we geeks call augmented, or boosted, reality. What it means is that you can have the real world overlaid and pumped up with virtual information.”

“Seems experimental to me, nabob,” says DeVito, wistfully. “Do you have her—I mean, BooRealis—up and running?”

“Oh, it is a prototype now,” says the nawab, breezily. “But in a year, we will have it on your phone ready to roll. Eventually, the physical and the virtual worlds will become one. Many versions of our BooRealis—or Boosted Reality—browser have already been developed, but we are proud to be able to bring this one step closer to reality.”

The nawab pulls out a shiny cellphone with a large display and show it to you and Danny with a flourish.

“We have been developing these BooRealis systems for ten years. Our first backpack systems were large, fragile, bulky, and showed primitive images due to the technology available. With the latest technology, everything has improved significantly and there are any number of exciting applications we could dream up. For example, in a new city, you could call up BooRealis, look through the camera at the surroundings that you are visiting for the first time, and see information displayed, in real time, about nearby restaurants, malls, ATMs, and rooms available for rent in front of buildings that house them.”

“That is amazing, nabob,” says DeVito, watching the display. “How does BooRealis do all this?”

“There’s an easy part, and there’s a hard part,” says the nawab. “The easy part is that we can pinpoint where you are standing now by using your phone’s global positioning and use your phone’s compass to make out in which direction the device is pointed. So we can guess what you are seeing. Then BooRealis simply pulls in information about points of interest in that sight line and displays it on top of the camera view.”

“So what’s the hard part?”

“Ah, there’s the rub,” sighs the nawab. “The information part. For such location-based applications to become killer applications, we need access to vast amounts of data tagged with location information. Such as popular digital mapping services. But they are still being put together. On the brighter side, we have been putting BooRealis to work on other applications. We have sly researchers at the some healthcare centers who can display X-ray and ultrasound readings directly on a patient’s body. Another team is getting down and dirty, exploring how an augmented-reality view under the hood might help auto mechanics with diagnostic and repair work.”

“That’s too real world and boring for me, nabob,” says DeVito. “Now if you had a game like Lara Croft, we may be getting somewhere.”

“We won’t disappoint you, Danny,” guffaws the nawab, patting DeVito on the back. “We are sure that in the short-term, the guys who may have the most to gain from BooRealis are part of the gaming business. Boosted reality games could engage people in the real world in entirely different ways.”

“And what would those ways be?”

“Well, for one thing, you could find a new meaning for space. Your office desk is not just where you shuffle papers—pull up BooRealis, and hey presto, it can be a virtual racetrack for a car game.”

“And you think that is a good idea for Baffle?” you say, huffing.

“Just joking,” says the nawab, looking sheepish.