Cross Reality

I’ll try my best to describe this new definition of hyper reality, but understand I’m still trying to get my head around it.

First, reality. Plain old reality. Go outside, go to the park. You understand this concept, yes?

Then there’s virtual reality. Computer-simulated environments. I remember when this meant putting on a heavy plastic welder’s helmet that burnt your retinas showing you out-of-focus polygons. Now, it can mean Second Life, a virtual world where you can put on cat ears and burn your retinas trying to work out why you suddenly crashed into a virtual billboard.

Augmented reality, in theory, is adding a layer of virtual over common reality. Normally in the form of a mobile phone (I still think AR should be in goggles) and using GPS, “viewing” reality then gets some extra information. It’s still in the very early stages of icons and hyperlinks. You could use an AR device to look at a building and see it has a giant floating marker above it or a yellow outline that then links to the building’s wiki page. We haven’t gone into William Gibson territory where your AR device shows that building being eaten by a 60-foot space squid. Yet.

So, what’s Cross Reality? ReadWriteWeb has these two articles, but I’ll summarise: Real world sensors affecting virtual reality world (and I guess vice-versa). In short, turn something on in the real world and the virtual thing comes on as well. If it isn’t happening yet, I imagine it will soon, but you can turn the virtual thing off and the real one will turn off as well.

As soon as AR get to the Gibsonesque animated giant squid stage, I guess it would also bridge the gap further. Imagine, I’m standing in an art gallery in Paris with my AR goggles, in front of a large kinetic sculpture with two buttons. I look to my left and I see a SecondLife avatar piloted by a man in front of his PC in Brazil. We can talk to each other. I press a button and the sculpture spins clockwise. Donaldo’s avatar presses the other button and the sculpture spins anti-clockwise. We are both seeing a spinning sculpture.

Then I walk away from Donaldo, clearly annoyed at his virtual button pressing. He sees me walk away and his cat ears display the “sad” expression.

This example, whilst elaborate, is pretty simple as I’m only talking about CAD models and synchronised switches.  Cross Reality can involve a serious sensor net pouring data into a virtual world. Augmented Reality in the invasion of the real by the virtual. Cross Reality is some of the Real World dripping into the virtual. And who are the purveyors of the materialistic reality with a repository of cold, hard reality-based information? Some sensors, some program architecture and your museum’s datashadow runs in tune with your museum without much further work.

Quick Example: You have a gallery with a SecondLife shadow. You hang pictures on the wall that have small RFID tags on corners of the frame (for positioning). Your virtual shadow also shows these pictures. When you change the exhibition, the virtual gallery changes automatically.

What could be potentially exciting is a plug-and-play system. Like when you plug in your USB drive to your PC it automatically recognises it and (hopefully) can run it straight away. Well, imagine your gallery having similar USB ports and when you plug in your… laser light show or something, your virtual world picks up the 3D model out of the device and has it act the same in the virtual world.