Author's note: This article was written as an assignment for DEA2510: History of Design Futures, a class taught by Chad Randl for the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University. This makes it a little more constrained to the deliverables of a prompt as opposed to natural paths of inquiry. It seeks to reflect on an innovation of a predictive nature presented between 1985 and 2005 and trace the development following that prediction to the present, in this case tracing Michael Naimark's 1984 “Spatial Correspondence in Motion Picture Display”. The subject of spatial augmented reality is a hot topic within contemporary themed entertainment, and as such I felt it is worth including on this site. I do not claim for this history to be comprehensive, rather I find that its value is in its focus on the trajectory of Naimark's ideas, specifically.
Spatial augmented
reality, more commonly known by its commercial name “projection mapping”, is
the practice of integrating synthetic information onto the real environment,
generally through film or video projection onto complex surfaces (Bimber and
Raskar, 2005). The technology is the product of an intersection of the larger
histories of film projection and virtual reality but has split to become a
separate technology in its own right (Jones, n.d.). This paper will examine the
earliest theorized example of spatial augmented reality, Michael Naimark’s
“Spatial Correspondence in Motion Picture Display”, as well as the trajectory of
the technology’s development compared to Naimark’s predictions for its future.
