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Yesterday at the Augmented Reality Lounge, an event co-organized by the New York Semantic Web Meetup and Porter Novelli (John Havens), it became clear to me that Augmented Reality (AR) could act as a metaphor for what a good user interface for a Semantic Web application might look like. The goal here would be to take the complexity, that we are faced with as information consumers on the web, out of the user experience and allow users to interact more “naturally” with objects, processes and concepts in a mixed reality environment. On the other hand this requires a whole new development language, tools and best practice to design efficient augmented reality applications, which will take their own time to mature. We currently see commercial adoption of AR in games, remote and non-invasive monitoring technologies and product prototyping and virtual testing. We discussed a number of projects that are currently getting media attention, most notably Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry TED demo of the SixthSense project and earthmine. Do to the time constraints we did not address the relationship between the Semantic Web and Augmented Reality in great detail, but it is obvious that rich semantic data structures will require a new user interface  paradigm to fully leverage the power and usefulness of networked data on the Semantic Web. We continued the conversation the following morning at the Web2.0Expo in New York at the “An Introduction to Augmented Reality”  panel led by John and contemplated about the name “Augmented Reality” and it’s origin, some additional demos and consideration of cultural and social implications of augmented reality technology by Jack Mason and his team at IBM’s Strategic Programs and Social Media that led to The Outernet Guidelines Initiative.  In case you are interested to followup on the conversation please consider to join us for the AR Dev Camp which will take place simultaneously in Mountain View, CA and New York City on December 5th 2009.

Zugara's Augmented Reality & Motion Capture Shopping App