Walk down the street, look at the world. This is real- ity. Now repeat, but wearing an odd-looking, bulky pair of glasses that place into your line of vision selective, relevant bits of data about the world; the data hovers in sight like virtual Post-it Notes, annotating your view. This is augmented reality. Glasses on, you glance to the right, at a vaguely familiar restaurant, and click a small button in your hand. Up pops text reminding you that Tom's Restaurant was the model for the diner on "Seinfeld"; not only that, but―according to the glasses, at least―the Morningside salad is worth ordering. When the technology for augmented reality (AR) is fully developed, the gear won't amount to much more than glasses and some sort of small unit like a PDA. Right now, though, it consists of about 26 pounds of equipment that gets strapped to the back and to the head, along with a shoulder-perching flying saucer-shaped antenna. The Mobile Augmented Reality System (MARS), developed at Columbia University (not far from Tom's Restaurant), has been assembled from off-the-shelf technology, including a 1GHz Dell lap- top with a graphics accelerator chip and soap-bar-sized batteries to power the display glasses and the critical positioning and orientation technologies. Strap on this rig and you look like a robothief on the lam from CompUSA.
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