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Augmented Reality Kitchen Takes Us 'Back to the Future'

by Matthew Zuras on January 28, 2010 at 06:59 AM


Recall with us, if you will, 'Back To the Future Part II,' in which Marty McFly leaves 1985 (25 years ago!), and shoots through time and space to arrive in 2015. It's sort of unnerving when you realize that's only five years from now. And just think about how many of the movie's predictions have already come true: from TV glasses to video conferencing to an MLB team in Miami. We have to give director Robert Zemeckis some credit.

The film's other nearly true prediction is the ubiquity of targeted advertising, which is now literally popping up through augmented reality (AR) interfaces. Bartlett School of Architecture graduate student Keiichi Matsuda has taken that prediction and furthered it to what seems, horrifically, like AR's next evolutionary stage. In the video below, Matsuda renders a kitchen overwhelmed with logos and advertisements, surely giving the editors at Adbusters a heart attack.

The video is not lacking a certain sense of humor. A disembodied hand manipulates the very cool AR interface to look up a recipe for making tea, and then surfs the Cloud (R.I.P. Internet?) while waiting for the kettle to warm. The hand then scans an AR fridge inventory instead of just looking inside the box. Matsuda has imagined a future where we are so dependent on technology that we have forgotten how to boil water.

That's not to say that we are opposed to AR interfaces, or against the idea of decorating our digital landscapes with Farah Fawcett posters like a less-geeky version of Second Life. But we would also like to be able to take the glasses off and disconnect from the matrix for a little while. AR all the time would be getting a little too "heavy" for us. [From: Technabob]

Tags: ar, augmented reality, AugmentedReality, back to the future ii, BackToTheFutureIi, bartlett school of architecture, BartlettSchoolOfArchitecture, keiichi matsuda, KeiichiMatsuda, kitchen, top

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