Augmented Reality: Connecting Mobile, Sensors, Location and Layers

Speaker: Augmented Reality Designer Clark Dodsworth

Augmented Reality (AR), nurtured in academia for years, has finally become commercially viable, enabled by the power/bandwidth curve of mobile computing platforms. Meanwhile, input and display hardware has reached sufficient maturity to enable devices reasonable to use and carry.


Clark will deliver a survey of the state of the art and lead a tour through the current work, vendors, and future directions in augmented reality, plus its overlap with ubiquitous computing, location-based services, machine vision, situational analysis, personalization, context awareness, privacy, and entertainment. He is an AR designer who recently worked on a mobile-ubiquitous-augmented reality project for theme parks in Dubai.

Clark predicts the result will alter the social, business, and personal fabric of our daily lives, and generate revenue streams for new and existing products, as well as whole industries that are not yet obvious.

Augmented reality, which could be said to have started with heads-up displays for aircraft pilots, has been illustrated in first-person shooter games and movies like Predator and Iron Man. But humans have been devising such augmentation for a very long time. Like the tell-tales on a sailboat that make visible the direction of the wind, the innovations of augmented reality will meld seamlessly into the devices we use every day. The first widespread users of AR won’t be wearing headgear, they’ll be using smartphones.