In Augmented Reality,

The user can see the real world around him, with computer graphics superimposed or composited with the real world. Instead of replacing the real world, we supplement it. Ideally, it would seem to the user that the real and virtual objects coexisted.
Augmented Reality

What is Augmented Reality? The basic goal of an AR system is to enhance the user's perception of and interaction with the real world through supplementing the real world with 3D virtual objects that appear to coexist in the same space as the real world. Many recent papers broaden the definition of AR beyond this vision, but in the spirit of the original survey we define AR systems to share the following properties:
1) Blends real and virtual, in a real environment
2) Real-time interactive
3) Registered in 3D
Registration refers to the accurate alignment of real and virtual objects. Without accurate registration, the illusion that the virtual objects exist in the real environment is severely compromised. Registration is a difficult problem and a topic of continuing research.

Augmented reality refers to the combination of the real and the virtual to "assist" the user in his environment. I Just Love Georgia Tech Guys

Eigth International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) 2009
October 19-23, 2009, Orlando, FL (USA)

www.augmented-reality.org Homepage of Augmented Reality.
This page is a portal to the world wide web of Augmented Reality (AR).
Currently the site is being ported to a new host - please accept our apologies for the missing functionality.

"Augmented reality is a spectacular kind of cyborg dream: a utopia where our very senses - our only way of directly interacting with the world - are themselves enhanced by information engineering. Some versions of it already exist. Military aircraft have already had a specialized kind of augmented reality for decades." Steven Poole: Edge 91

The list for the ISMAR Symposium series is currently available. So many symbioses, so little time.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a relatively new research field. Its basic concept is to place information into the user's perception, registered with the environment. In most cases, this means to place visual information (computer graphics) into the user's field of view, but there are also approaches for augmenting the acoustic sense and the haptic sense. One of the main challenges of AR is to keep these artificial objects registered to the real world, so that they appear to the user as fixed to the environment. About 50% of the current work in AR is devoted to develop tracking approaches that provide low latency, high accuracy, and that are not too cumbersome for the user to wear. AR is not only applied to the visual sense---all other senses can be augmented as well by AR means. Augmented Reality

I have no idea what is really going on in that photograph above, taken in Tehran, on June 14th I believe. All I know, is that something very great and creative and alive is happening. One out of 40 images in a series, this one was singular in the amount of emotion it was expressing. The horizontal man could be body surfing, or in a mosh pit, or willing himself to be used as a battering ram (and the Latin name for a sexual fetish of that nature would be what again?)

He reminds me of a powerful image I remember being published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine back in the 1980's. A dead ACTUP member had wanted his body thrown over the White House fence and onto the grounds, in a final act of civil disobedience---a rebuke to the hatred and marginalization he felt was at the root of his disease. It was meant as a kind of "will my body to science" political gesture, but to me it represented a transcendent desire to do whatever could be done with whatever resources could be mustered---even unto spanning the line between the realms. I always wonder if that's what Jews do.

The picture was taken from deep inside a work van, with the back doors open, letting in the only available light. The low space is crowded with people, crouching around an lidless wooden coffin holding an ashen figure, his arms crossed formally across his chest. A hot lesbian in a spaghetti-strap tee so completely dominates the group, as she orchestrates a clandestine strategy for success before the authorities can stop them, that I know it wouldn't be me giving her any lip.

I find being gay like this all so superior to what I've witnessed in Jewish behavior during the Second Intifada---which is the first Intifada I paid any attention to. I remember reading Clyde Haberman's January 26, 1995 Times article, Police in Israel Identify Two Gazans as the Suicide Bombers, which told us 19 Israelis were killed, with another 65 wounded in two attacks, without having any insight---taking it all in at face value, and for granted. I had no key for that lock

But it was Clyde Haberman's Times article from September 5, 2001, Man in Orthodox Jew's Garb Sets Off Blast in Jerusalem, which I only read this past year, that single-handedly caused an awakening in me, seeing the painful reality that Arlington, then New York represented; moving on to see these attacks in Israel as all false-flag self-woundings---in Israel, by Israel, on Israel.

Actually, it was a single word in that article

"This latest suicide bombing, apparently by a Palestinian in disguise, might have been catastrophic, the police said, had those two officers not become suspicious of the backpack that the man was carrying. It is not typical gear for ultra-Orthodox men in Jerusalem. They stopped him before he could reach an intersection a few dozen yards ahead, packed with people heading to work and to nearby schools during the morning rush.

"The body count, they suggested, could have been high, on a street that is only a block from the pizzeria where another suicide bomber killed himself and 15 other people last month.

"As it was, this man in a black skullcap managed to reach into his bag in time to set off explosives that wounded 20 people, in addition to blowing himself apart so thoroughly that parts of his body were flung 30 feet."

This was the first suicide bombing in Israel by someone costumed as a Hasidic Jew and no one stopped to wonder afterward if it really was a Hasidic Jew, besides Clyde Haberman's moment of honest skepticism? Just look at these three paragraphs, that twist cause and effect, protagonist and antagonist. "They stopped him?" He'd been walking from wherever he had come from until this moment, when police officers noticed him, engaged him perhaps, "caught on" finally, numskulls, I've been schlepping this damn bag already waiting for you to spot it!

Do you think a Palestinian would perfect a disguise but accidentally blow it by misreading the cultural cues of a handbag? Just so he could blow himself up into tiny pieces without doing serious damage to any Israeli? Let's start the article from the beginning,

"What stuck in his mind, the police officer said later, was how the man smiled. He did not say a word, this bearded fellow who seemed at first, from the way he dressed, to be an ultra-Orthodox Jew walking along a Jerusalem thoroughfare called the Street of the Prophets.

"He just smiled from the corner of his mouth," Sgt. Maj. Guy Mugrabi of the Israeli border police recalled.

"And then the man blew himself up.

"The explosion sent Sergeant Major Mugrabi and his partner, Officer Natan Sandaka, flying at least 10 feet. It rocked downtown Jerusalem today and echoed across the city as far away as two miles or more."

The police officer, Sgt. Maj. Guy Mugrabi, sounds like he's innocent and 23, definitely not initiated into 38-degree Masonry or Jewry yet. Still in awe after his traumatic brush with death, what stuck with him was the ironic grin of a ritual suicide who was sparing him his own life---which isn't how he could conceptualize it. Nor is it the most credible narrative detail to put forth in establishing the frenzy of hate Israeli's face from their co-claiming Sinai-ites. But no one around the world bats an eye, the cocooning paradigm is so total and complete.

"Officer Sandaka, 21, who was closest to the bomber, was described tonight as fighting for his life at Hadassah Medical Center here, though most of the other injuries were not severe.

"It was "very frightening -- very, very," Sergeant Major Mugrabi, 24, told reporters from his hospital bed, where he was treated for slight injuries. "But if we don't do our job, nobody will."

"The bomb today was the fifth that exploded in Jerusalem in a little more than 24 hours. The others were planted near buildings and vehicles in parts of the city far from downtown, and they caused only a handful of relatively minor injuries."