Augmented Reality

Image courtesy of howstuffworks.com

Augmented Reality is having an image beamed directly onto your retina or overlayed via sunglasses or other device that can also be accompanied by audio.

It basically brings up information displayed digitally over your field of vision. This information might include such things as place names, speech translations, distance to a specific target, advertisements (this could probably be dealt with by spam-blockers) and practically reams of other information.

How will it work? The minituarisation and doubling of price\performance of computer processing power plus wireless connectivity to the web (the current exponential trends in these areas point to the next decade when this will be feasible).

So the merging of the web with real life will be interesting, with many profound implications for daily life. You could instantly acquire any information you want, for example, you may ask aloud (and the computer interprets it via speech to text translation and does a search for the query) the distance between where you are and a certain location and the computer displays the information for you.