There must be another way!

Okay, it’s still far from usable for AR scenarios, but I wanted to include this one, nevertheless. Nikon just announced a new coolpix camera, that includes its own pico projector to display 640×480 images at a 2 m distance max. “So what the h…?!” you could say.

But disregarding the fact, that the quality or battery will probaly suck really bad, it’s another option for Augmented Reality scenarios. If good HMDs don’t show up soon, there could be the alternative to project all you need into your field of view. Of course this needs high ANSI-Lumen projections for daylight scenarios and another disadvantage can be the non-existing privacy, you’d have with a HMD. On the other hand this can also be an advantage to share augmented information. If one could run the (video) camera and the projector at the same time, we could do the tracking and distort the projection to fit the user’s perspective. As usual I refer to Oliver Bimber’s team here. :-) I still believe HMDs will be faster to hit the market, but depending on the scenario, maybe there is another way…