Augmenting Realities

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see the fantastic "Matisse, His Art and His Textiles" exhibition with a friend at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. 

Although I have always had a strong affinity for his work, the show made me realize how little I knew about the artist and his inspiration which was so strongly driven by textiles.

One of the rooms had a series of oil paintings (picture below taken with my Treo) with the word 'Odalisque' in the title and I had absolutely no idea what this meant.  Treo 650 to the rescue...  I pointed my browser to mobile.answers.com and within a minute had my answer: A concubine or woman slave in a harem. 

My friend was impressed while I was thinking about what I had just done beyond the fact that it was just a simple mobile search.  What struck me standing there in front of the real painting is how I had brought the physical and the digital worlds together and my mind began to wonder about the potential for future 'Augmented Realities' (or variations thereof) using mobile devices.

I don't know why but I have paused to think about this particularly when exposed to art and architecture as well as tourism situations.  For example, while visiting Rodin's museum in Paris and admiring the sculptures in the garden I wished that I could either dial a telephone number or visit a webpage that could instantly provide me with additional information about what I was seeing.  In the same vein, a city tour could be augmented by a GPS enabled mobile device from which one could pull information about your immediate surroundings (something like Location Based Services but without the banal proposed commercial applications).

I have no doubt that we will be seeing a lot more developments on this front in years to come - I can't wait...

Treonauts are always questionning realities...