I think that even with a perfect game system SR is the only game system that would require new editions - because of technological advancements, looking back over 2nd edition stuff, it's kind of funny what we thought would be bleeding edge tech because there are alot of things in these books that we already have. That being said SR4's Augmented Reality systems seems not only plausible but inevitable and I have to say I can't wait to have a wireless commlink headset that can monitor and digest information on the go and allow me to interact with the digital world. I would even say that it would awesome to deal with the annoyance of advertisements bombarding my visual overlay.
A bit farther away in the future I willa lso say that I'll be one of the first people in line to get a datajack to jack into the interweb but i think AR will be much sooner.
I'd even go so far as to say it's only 10 years or so away.
Thoughts?
It's like AI - just another decade. Always another decade.
AR is already there through some smartphone (and PC) applications. They have two drawbacks:
1. Object recognition still requires too much computing power to be done in real-time on mobile devices
2. No AR glasses so you have to look through your phone screen
Problem 1. won't likely be solved anytime soon, though we're slowly getting there. Hopefully, even without advanced object recognition, we can still do pretty cool things.
As for problem 2. the first consumer grade AR glasses should arrive next year, if not before. It'll probably take a few more years to get a solid tech and a widespread use, though.
http://www.engadget.com/tag/augmented+reality/
If you want to see a good example of an AR application that people already use, take a look at http://layar.com/.
Here's a related article I stumbled over today: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24936/?a=f
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