Do you remember back in the early nineties when the phrase Virtual Reality got used far too much? Now it appears Augmented Reality is the choice catchphrase of this decade.

Augmented reality has now come out in book form. You might not be able to see this from the photo, but the boy is holding a normal book, but what he is seeing on a live-feed webcam video are the three-dimensional representations of planets and UFOs. Is that cool or what? That sounds like it will delight children of all ages.

These Augmented Reality Pop-Up Books work using a normal webcam and custom piece of camera recognition software that can superimpose images in real-time. This new and impressive piece of tech was first shown at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, but it is something that I would definitely want to see on many a book.

In fact, I wouldn’t mind if every college textbook was wired for this Augmented Reality. It would have made 3-D graphing in my Calculus class a whole lot easier to visualize than those flat graphs in the textbook.

Something tells me we’ll be hearing a lot more about this Augmented Reality in the future, but won’t see it happen for quite a while.

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