FastForward: Heads-Up Displays, Augmented Reality

First in an occasional series of brief looks at a technology, its present and future, and its expression in science fiction. Today: heads-up displays and augmented reality, two technologies that differ in degree more than in kind. For example:

Today: HUDs for your bike helmet and augmented reality (AR) for your walk around Salzburg.

Tomorrow: Synthetic vision systems that replace reality altogether, such as this one showing pilots a "tunnel in the sky" to where they want to go.

As usual, science fiction got here long before science. Here I'm thinking primarily about the AR in Rainbows End, where high-school kids use wearable computers to navigate through real and imagined spaces. But Wikipedia jogged my memory that Charles Stross's Halting State includes Copspace, a heads-up display for law enforcement. And who could forget Iron Man's in-flight HUD or his armor's simultaneous takedown of a half-dozen or so thugs in 2008's Robert Downey Jr. vehicle?

More ominously, you get HUDs so compelling as to keep the remainder of humanity in their chairs—their entire lives—in WALL-E.

Even though WALL-E is satire, it's not that far; witness my wife and I walking near the Verizon Center last night during rush hour. An oncoming pedestrian was so absorbed in texting that we had to split apart and duck out of her way at the last second. The ped never noticed us. Playing World of Warcraft? Shopping for jeans? Searching for a date? We'll never know.