Within the next five years, your living room may become a real-world Super Mario Brothers level, your furniture may become the terrain for the next Starcraft, and your front yard may become the sidelines of a Madden football field. As augmented reality technology improves, gaming as we know it will move from the screen to the tabletop to the living room to the entire building—and eventually out into the world. Augmented reality is essentially the idea of rendering computer-generated media on top of our view of the world around us, creating the illusion that media has been pushed into the world and merged with it. This technology can completely change the way we see, hear, touch (and perhaps eventually smell and taste) the world around us… As more powerful mobile processors, GPUs, new kinds of sensors, higher speed networks, and eventually immersive, see-through, head-worn displays develop, AR technology will follow suit. Take for example software like Qualcomm's own Vuforia technology, which my students and I use to develop AR games like NerdHerder at Georgia Tech.
