SyFy’s The Lost Room demos Augmented Reality
Imagine you go to the World Trade Center’s Ground Zero in New York, pull out your mobile device, turn on its camera and through it you see how the area looked days after the 9/11 attacks. You pan to the left and see the surrounds. Hit a button and see how it was before the attacks. You can immerse yourself in these different scenes from the past as they come alive while standing on the actual street corner of the scene.
This technology already exists and it’s called Augmented Reality – which is created through the merger of your mobile device’s GPS and camera. And while some of us have been thinking about it and trying to come up with journalistic ways of using it, it occurred to me that this experience was demo’ed in a cool way.
In a pivotal scene in SyFy‘s mini series The Lost Room, the main character pulls out an “object” and has this virtual, immersive experience inside a mysterious hotel room:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxFF-IFZ4WQ
SPOILER ALERT-ish: This is a key scene, but this video clip is in Spanish… so at least you can see what I’m talking about.
Swap the Polaroid for today’s smartphone and imagine having these experiences now. Let’s say a street perform digital embeds a show in the subway location he typically performs at. When not there, someone waiting for a train can pull out their phone and experience a show.
Um, so what is stopping us from experimenting with this stuff?
NOTE: If you have not seen the AMAZING series, you need to. My mind was blown!