The Unsung History of Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality, or AR represents what could well be the next big step in user interaction paradigms between humans and software interfaces. This idea, coined spacial computing seeks to remove data and software from being imprisoned inside a screen or headset and scatter it to the four winds where it will become a part of the very world around us.

This sea change will affect everything we do as humans, from our everyday interactions to how we construct our settlements. Like every big technological leap there has been a lot of misplaced hype which will be followed by a slow, organic adoption. The idea of enhancing the real world with an additional interface or adding the real world to an interface might seem futuristic but the ideas and execution have been around a lot longer.

It could be argued that the modern idea of AR was accidentally invented by famed author L. Frank Baum (yes, that one) in his novel The Master’s Key. The protagonist is given a magical set of glasses that show people’s characteristics when they look at them, a cross between dystopian social credit systems and Google Glass. It was actually invented in 1968 by Ivan Sutherland, a computer scientist at MIT. He created a headset that displayed 3D objects in front of the user using a headset so heavy it needed to be suspended from the ceiling. Impractical is not the word.

The next important step in consumer AR came from an unlikely source: Nintendo. Launched in 1998 alongside their revised Gameboy Color hardware, the Gameboy…