2010 Horizon Report

The New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project is much more than a report that is reprinted into several languages, distributed internationally and created for higher education, K-12, and museums.

The Project is a true collaboration in its creation of reports. I had the privilege of serving on the Advisory Board in 2007, but while the Board makes final determinations of the contents, anyone can scout, tag, and comment on recommended technologies. Fittingly, EDUCAUSE adopted the NMC’s project and process. The 2011 Horizon Report is scheduled to be released at the annual EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) conference next month in Washington, DC.

For the 2010 report, one key technology predicted for adoption within two-three years is simple augmented reality (AR). Today, I purchased 20 virtual shares of augmented reality stock to boost my virtual net worth on the predictions game presented by the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education http://markets.nitle.org I also referenced augmented reality in the Delphi Method Activity.

Augmented reality is expected to proliferate to produce $350 million in revenues by 2014 according to ABI Research (p.22). The use of tablet computers that use front and back facing cameras will fuel more rapid growth of AR. Markers read by cameras and mobile GPS positioning allow AR-enabled gaming and data visualization. Just as there has been an explosion of apps both for devices and the Web, AR content will be available for every aspect of daily life. The preservation of digital evidence that contains AR intrigues me for how the Law field will be transformed.

The trend reported in the 2010 Horizon Report that fits well with AR is the abundance of meaning making through available resources, relationships and the ability to author, create, and eventually annotate everything you see and experience. Expertise will become both clearer and murkier to detect, changing the role of educational institutions fundamentally. AR will dovetail with mobile computing and data visualization. Gesture-based computing will eventually enable the ability to annotate reality to enabling us to author our own personal AR.