Our own Jeff Franklin joined analysts, innovators, and experts in imaging and Augmented Reality in New York City for the 6Sight Conference. Jeff was part of a panel that discussed Augmented Reality and intelligent imaging – being able to determine various types of information from an image such as object and facial recognition – and image context. Image context includes being at a dinner party and photos from the party are searchable with information related to the dinner party. The purpose of intelligent imaging is that people take a large quantity of pictures, so information is attached to the images for quick retrieval when searched. This is a fast moving field and full of emerging technology, so expect to hear more! What were hot topics at the conference? They included mobile cameras improving in quality, being able to share pictures easier (think a “connected camera”), intelligent imaging, and, of course, augmented reality.

Jeff Franklin (center) on the Imaging and Augmented Reality panel at 6Sight (photo courtesy Joe Byrd).

My personal take on future trends is augmented reality will be huge but it is going to be a while before the term is adopted into popular language. Therefore, we will see widespread use of AR without the use of the name. At the moment, augmented reality is a very emerging technology without name recognition. However, people can (and do) use the technology without knowing what it is called or how it works. I would expect this to be a growing trend, so stay tuned.