Augmented Reality & TV – On stage with Dale Herigstad at ARWorld

It was a great honor to speak with Dale Herigstad at Germany’s augmented reality event ARWorld in Düsseldorf last monday. Dale Herigstad is chief creative office at digital media agency Schematic, he’s an internationally recognized thought leader on the future of media consumption in an interactive and many-screen world of increasingly rich media interfaces and was part of the research team that developed the visionary gestural interfaces that first appeared in the movie “Minority Report”. In our presentation “From science fiction to fact” we pointed out the intersection of content consumption in augmented reality and TV. This was particularly interesting as Dale has an extensive background in broadcast design and branding and has pioneered a unique spatial context approach to designing advanced navigation systems for interactive TV and connected screens which blurs the lines between TV, games, web and mobile.

Interestingly the whole layer metaphor, well-known in augmented reality, can be transitioned into the field of TV as well. Visionary concepts of future TV interfaces and content consumption heavily rely on stereoscopic 3D approaches. Stereoscopic 3D basically creates the 3-dimensional spatial experience that we’re already playing with in mobile augmented reality as with our real-world canvas. From there one we’re talking about any kind of layers either on mobile ar or on TV. And let’s just add an abstraction of TV as just another screen in a whole multi-screen environment to get an idea of where we’re heading to with augmented reality as a new medium. AR glasses intermix reality with fiction, gesture control abandons mouse and keyboard, thought-controlled interfaces further merge man with machine and the growing availability of mobile devices paves the way for the massive distribution of augmented reality applications. Your own everyday context becomes the gateway to a world of virtual information.

The day closed with in intense Q&A session called “Ask the experts” where everybody was invited to ask questions, give comments and discuss about the future of augmented reality. I joined the expert panel together with Dr. Martin Kurze, Head of Interaction Systems Engineering at Deutsche Telekom, Nick Sohnemann, Innovation Advisor at TrendONE and Thomas Nindl, Director Business Development Central Europe at Qualcomm (from left to right).

It was an honor to be member of the ARWorld expert commitee together with keynote speaker and internet guru Ossi Urchs who also moderated the event, Andreas Hauser from Mobilizy, the company behind the Wikitude augmented reality browser, and Oliver Schiffers of Sapient Nitro.