Augmented Human

Foreword

When Helen told me that she was authoring Augmented Human: How Technology is Shaping the New Reality, I volunteered (actually begged her) to let me write this foreword. At the time, I had not read a manuscript and had only an inkling of what she was going to say, but knowing Helen’s scholarly reputation and thoughtfulness, I knew that her take on the emerging technology of augmented reality and its applications in augmenting humans would be insightful, if not profound.

There have been a lot of people who have worked together to create this new medium. For many years it was looked upon as a novelty or solution looking for a problem to solve. There wasn’t enough crowd appeal to move it past the tipping point of mass adoption—this being necessary for enough investment and attention toward making AR economically viable, and thus, widespread. My qualification for writing this foreword stems from the dubious honor of being one of those so-called pioneers who suffered through the beginnings of AR technology development.

In my case the journey began 52 years ago, when as a USAF officer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, I worked on designing better cockpits for fighter aircraft and other military vehicles. My job was to solve the problem of getting bandwidth to and from the pilot’s brain given the sheer complexity of the systems they needed to operate in highly stressful and dangerous environments. This problem is what motivated me to explore augmented reality approaches that ...