Augmented Reality on Bloomberg Innovators, and Current Gaps

The weekly links post over at Games Alfresco - a blog about the latest and greatest industry and research advances in augmented reality - had a link to a documentary made by Bloomberg News. It's an episode of their Innovators program and focuses entirely on augmented reality.

If you are interested in the current state of AR and want to see some of the big names in research and industry, take the time to watch this video. I was excited to see many of the people I met at the last ISMAR conference as well. Some of the most well known projects are shown, though not all of the coolest stuff is in there.

One thing that sticks out is that I can't really say there was much discussion on why augmented reality was good. Why it will truly help us socially, cognitively, and so on. This is a gap I see in many research papers as well. Technologists are often able to say things like "it's good because you can look at it from all angles." But why is that good? What theories support that? This is a gap I'm trying to fill. Won't say too much more now, but hopefully it will be something I can publish that will be useful to prove that value of augmented reality in the future.