Augmented reality is novel, but without the practical everyday technology to view and interact with it, its growth will likely be as slow as RSS.

You remember RSS in the 1990s? Not many people do. When RSS was created many developers said it would never take off, and some even proclaimed it dead on arrival. Most people remember discovering RSS more recently with the advent of readers and the epic explosion of CMSs that made it easier for millions of people to produce content with RSS feeds. With all those feeds, people needed an easier way to aggregate, or curate, the data being created.

Augmented reality requires the same leap in technology and mass penetration of everyday, practical use of a viewing platform. Today, that’s limited mostly to cellphones. But we don’t use our cellphones often enough to practically engage our surrounding environment. We use it to stop what we’re doing and access static information or to communicate with others in an experience that is completely detached from our surroundings.

Some people think the amount of technology we have increases into the future, but they are wrong. Technology actually converges and reduces the number of things we rely on in the future. 12 years ago, I carried a PDA and a cell phone around with me and was chained to a desk for access to the internet. Today, all of that comes in an iPhone. In the very near future, cell phones, laptops, televisions, game consoles, GPS navigation, electronic billboards, ATMs, credit cards, ID and more will all converge, and augmented reality will make that possible.

Accessing data has increasingly become mobile over time, moving it closer to our natural interaction with the world, but the next big step in the way we interact with data is interactively overlaying it onto our surroundings allowing us to engage data in the same way and same time we interact with reality.

Imagine roadways no longer cluttered with billboards, directions overlayed onto your visual field. Imagine accessing Google’s Streetview skins, photos or video from various years for any location on the planet. Imagine communicating with people who appear before you or accessing and manipulating any data in the space in front of you. We can do this now with all kinds of different existing technology, but until these technologies converge and have mass penetration, adoption and exploration of augmented reality will be slow. But it is starting to happen. If you read the user reviews on Amazon.com for the video glasses that exist now, you’ll see gamers say they buy the glasses so they don’t have to carry around televisions. Practical necessity is driving the convergence of technologies that will make augmented reality a part of our everyday lives.

In this video clip from today’s Morning Browser, I play with rudimentary augmented reality and explore how you can create basic augmented reality elements using Google SketchUp with an AR plugin.