The fiducial explosion

It should be apparent by now that fiducials, tracking and sensing are some of the new elements that will pervade the computing environment as additional extensions of our senses. In a way it is the computer's way of making sense (with help from humans for now) of the world they co-inhabit with the carbon based creatures.

Here are some early examples, most of them including animation and different 3D environments, like VRML:

Don't disregard them because of their crudeness in some cases. Remeber this is an emergent technology. When the game of Pong came out and everybody went pong-crazy, nobody could remotely imagine the simplest 3D game that we know today.
Based on the exponential curve of the technology it won't take but a few years for this early examples to fall in that category. And we will say the same thing; nobody could imagine what has come out of it!.

Make sure to watch the end of the drawing demo.

Getting serious:-) Also watch the second half of this one. In general they are long because at this stage users are fascinated and they can't get enough. Like Arthur C. Clark said in his three "laws" of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.