Will Augmented Reality Books Bridge the Digital-Physical Divide?

Disney is going for a ride on the augmented-reality bandwagon, and it's betting the future of play will involve digital imagery that interacts with tangible objects—what the company describes as "traversing the digital-physical divide."

The concept is being developed at Disney Research labs with a new prototype device called HideOut. It's a handheld pico projector that projects digital images onto pre-marked surfaces, bringing children's books and board games to life as you move the device.

For instance, if the digital character is following a maze and hits an object representing a wall, it will turn around and try another route. When he comes across a cardboard cutout of a trampoline, he starts jumping up and down. These are hardly superheroic actions, but somehow when the digital reaction is caused by a "real" thing, it's Disney magical.

The technology itself is pretty simple. Infrared-absorbing drawings invisible to the human eye are hidden on the page, and come to life when the projector hovers over them. At the same time, the device can sense and track normal print drawings, so that the character being projected interacts with them. Hence, when the "reader" leads the character through a drawing of a puddle, she leaves digital footprints behind.

Most AR technology today is a one-way street. Smartphone apps and wearable devices like Google Glass superimpose a digital dimension over a real-world environment, like a parallel universe. When you project the image directly into the physical world without a display in the middle, suddenly the universes overlap. "User attention can be solely focused on the physical environment," developers wrote in a research paper.

Disney's dabbled in augmented reality for some time. Early this year it released its first AR toys. The idea was, you hold your iPad in front of a toy and an animated disney character would play it.

As it's somewhat of a buzz kill to watch someone else play with your toy, HideOut could have a better chance of catching on. But as long as you still have to hold a projector, I doubt it's going to make waves with adult readers and gamers.

Hence, the goal is to eventually integrate the projector into a mobile phone, and make the technology available to developers to build apps for. At that point you can let your mind run wild with the possibilities.

Augmented reality apps now can enhance the real-world with data, telling you, say, where the closest train station is. Wearable computers like Google Glass—even contact lenses someday—display a virtual world over the real one. Augmented billboards or comic books animate when you hold a smartphone screen in front of them.

But all that's just one direction. Imagine if you could also project data and images into the physical world, and interact with those, too.

Actually we don't have to imagine, because the technology already exists. In 2009 MIT scientists developed a seriously mind-blowing project called SixthSense, a wearable computer/camera/projector that essentially turns the human into a smartphone, and any surface in the real-world into an interactive screen that recognizes gestures.

If you hold your hands in the shape of a square up to the sky, it snaps a photo. If you draw a circle on your palm, it tells you the time. Is this the direction Disney's sniffing in? I hope so.

Alas, MIT developers predicted it would take as long as 10 years for SixthSense to be commercially available, and similar technology is also in early stages. As for Disney, it still has to work on making the HideOut device small enough to embed in an iPhone, and easier to interact with. No matter how sci-fi trippy the technology is, no one's going to care for very long if it's not fun to play with.