Augmented Reality is obviously the distilled nectar of the future, so I’ve been looking for SDKs. Here are some links:

Here’s one from the NRC, which is broken (via MAKE).

Here’s the GPL’d ARToolKit (pictured above).

I’m sure there are more but I have iPhone code to write. Must… Close… Browser…

Oh, and if you think AR is still a looong way off check this out, from Introversion, the coolest little game company on the planet (via BB Offworld):

That’s from a great nuclear war game based on that one movie War Games, which they’re porting to AR so you can watch armies move and nukes fly across the surface of your own little globe, God-stylee.

The Japanese, of course, are using the technology to make perversion cute. Here’s cube-girl ARis:

The idea is to use a digital video camera to recognize some canonical object in the world, something weird enough to likely be unique in the environment which also provides location and orientation data. Once you have that you get all the tools the computer graphics guys have been working on for decades and decades to change the output.

The other, essential, component is virtual light. Various clinical trials for blindness prosthetics have been spun off over the last decade. They’re now coming to fruition.

Dr. Z showed me a magazine article, something like “The 100 Greatest Scientific Advances of 2008″, which went into detail about a patient who recovered sight when a chip was implanted directly into her retina. Now, I don’t want to volunteer and I don’t want to be an early adopter here — it’s literally bleeding (scalpel) edge alpha tech — but in principle we’re getting there.

More miniaturization, better resolution, a good power-supply solution, WiFi, and suddenly we’re cooking with gas.

AR for everyone: Two decades out? The top card of the deck standing up, dancing a little jig and singing: “I am either face or ace, / The probabilities say that you should raise!”