Does the heads up display in a military jet fighter count as Augmented Reality? In the 1950s, a "pipper" was projected on the inside of the windscreen as a computed gun sight to aid in dog fights with other aircraft. The computations took into account the relative velocities of the aircraft, projected bullet trajectories, etc. Not long after that, radar displays were also projected onto the windscreen along with an artificial horizon. The 2010 Horizon Report claims that the first examples of AR occurred in the late 1960s.
In a modern fighter like the F-22 a great deal of study has been directed to how to display the needed information without overloading the pilot and without requiring him to shift his eyes down to the instrument panel during a tense situation. Modern researchers into augmented reality should be aware of this body of information so they do not reinvent the wheel.
Games drive consumer versions of augmented reality, but there are obviously many other applications. Of particular interest to me are surgical techniques augmented in real time with super high resolution ultrasound. As an engineer, I know that ultrasound has a lot of potential for improvements in resolution and discrimination. If this information can be presented in 3D and real time to the surgeon, many new surgical procedures become possible.
My two favorite topics in the 2009 report, Smart Objects and Semantic-Aware applications, did not make it into the 2010 report. Smart Objects may suffer from the "solution in search of a problem" problem, while Semantic-Aware Applications may require more difficult development than was anticipated. In both cases, time-to-adoption horizon was estimated at four to five years. Our ability to predict that far into the future is questionable.
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