Speaking of heaven

We beat up on augmented reality a few posts back, so let's be fair and think where a visual internet could go when unhinged from flat screens. No, not holding magazines up to computer cams, but instead, a world in the future where you wear glasses and see a newer reality with appendages you want. Tiny computers would project images onto your lens, overlaying perfectly with the real world behind like the magic yellow line on NFL football fields. The first step would be adding information about contacts or products; nimbuses of stats about colleagues, halos of data surrounding each soup can in the aisle to aid your navigation through life.

Of course we would take it further, tweaking our perception of reality for greater self-pleasure just as we now tint the world blue or orange with designer sunglasses. If you're into goth, you could make the world look like a vampire flick. If you're into self-image, you gaze down and see a fitter you, trimmed and tucked. No one would have to buy fashionable clothes any more, because we would see everyone else in the fashions that we, the visual receivers, want.

This isn't fantasy; we already alter our audio reality with iPod earbuds, piping in fictitious sounds that set dream moods that don't exist. So why not adjust the eye vision, too? Say with virtual rings around the Earth -- like the view from Paris at 1:01 in this clip.

Via MTLB and Nerdcore. Inspired by @tsand, who reminded us that augmented reality is just a baby with a long ways to go.