I'm not sure when exactly "augmented reality" went mainstream, but I remember when I first saw it in practice. Mini ran a print advertisement that, when viewed on a web-cam through their web-site would show a 3D car that could be rotated when you turned the magazine. Since that point Sony has toyed with the idea by combining their eye-toy with cards to create 3D creatures with the future promise of them coming to life.
Sony's Eyepet has not yet been released, but seems destined to come out eventually and be the first program to put this into practice. A 3D creature that you interact with by looking at your television and observing the augmented reality of your own world with a pet wandering around that you can interact with. While the demos all suggest that you will either need to play this on the floor (as most pictures show) or have a table in front of you, the idea of looking into what is effectively a mirror, but seeing an altered reality is clearly a glimpse into the future. This isn't far from the star trek holodeck!
Since the Sony camera is limited to a 2D understanding of the world, the interactions with this pet will be limited. You may not fully get the sense that you're in this world because you could grab your pet from various angles and the system would not know the difference. That's why the 3D camera from the xbox makes the technology all the more promising. From all accounts the 3D camera has no problem identifying one or more people and converting them into a virtual stick-figure and moving them in a 3D space. Clearly the "augmented reality" portion of the exercise is nothing incredibly complex since it has been run in web-browsers and even on the PSP. So now that we have the technology for the holodeck remind me, what did they do on that? I never actually watched star trek... Sorry!
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