This is the ultimate Augmented Reality demo

Ultimate Augmented Reality

The new Sony Playstation 4 is pushing augmented reality about as far as we've seen so far. Imagine if your Google Glass started doing this...

Even if you're not into games, what you're about to see here will stop you in your tracks and make you wonder what it was you just saw.

And then, when you've stopped feeling a bit weird, just think about the power and the complexity of the machine that made all this happen. That it's in the shops for $399 is pretty amazing when you consider what's going on in there. And congratulations to the programmers too.

Waiting for a good use

Augmented reality is out there waiting for a really good use. Dancing, playful robots isn't necessarily one of them, but if it can do this, it's the other things it can do that are really exciting.

And when you couple that with, perhaps, the information that's available on the internet, and a retinal projection device that paints a picture not on a screen but the back of your eye, you can start to see how the world will, literally, look like a very different place in a short space of time.

Guided home

What's most exciting, perhaps, is that Augmented Reality will not  just help those who need more information in their daily lives, but people who have lost some of their abilities. You can imagine people with dementia being gently guided home by an Augmented Aeality device that they wear, by showing them objects and symbols that they're familiar with and reassured by.

Ultimately, does this mean we're going to lose our sense of what reality really is? But isn't that what they said when television - and even film - first arrived?

Video after the break