Reality Bites

Stephen Barker is creatively frustrated.

The creativity stems from augmented reality, a real-world view of something enhanced by computer-based technology and graphics. The ubiquitous yellow first down line on televised football games, for instance, is augmented reality. And some fighter pilots have cockpit displays that utilize augmented reality.

Barker didn't invent augmented reality. But he was blown away by it when he saw it for the first time in 2005, while in graduate school in California. He believed augmented reality would trump virtual reality because augmentation delivers computer-generated views to the real world, not a simulation in a fake world. Virtual reality essentially flopped.