A few days ago Ryan Stewart posted an article entitled: Adobe on the Gartner Hype Cycle 2009. In it, there is graph that includes a variety of technologies on a continuum of discovery, exploration, experimentation, and adoption. You'll notice "Augmented Reality" nearing the peak of Inflated Expectations followed by the pit of despair Trough of Disillusionment.

I agree with Ryan that Adobe is in a really good (sustaining) position with its diverse product portfolio... but let's talk about the peaks and valleys and how they affect developers. After all, these highs-and-lows typically translate into finding or being out of work... wasting time or being productive... and lets use Augmented Reality as context.

Hardware Limitations = Show Stopper
The key to success / adoption for Augmented Reality (AR) is tied directly to it's ability to keep in-step with our tangible world. The key term here is 'reality' and it needs some definition... else we risk pushing ourselves higher - towards that nasty peak.

Let's get 'real' with Michael F. Deering and a paper entitled The Limits of Human Vision. The abstract is sobering.

"A model of the perception limits of the human visual system is presented, resulting in an estimate
of approximately 15 million variable resolution pixels per eye. Assuming a 60 Hz stereo
display with a depth complexity of 6, we make the prediction that a rendering rate of approximately
ten billion triangles per second is sufficient to saturate the human visual system."

Stepping back a bit... most of the AR examples that I've seen so far show developers using inexpensive web cameras tracking primitive shapes in a 640X480 window at ~10fps. It's important to note that hardware manufacturers advertise openly that the 'quality' of that experience is dramatically affected by the speed of your computer, number of running applications, background tasks, and etc. If you expect high frame rates you are probably going to have to drop to a window size of 320X240 perhaps less... or get some serious hardware and forget about laptops for a while.

So, calling it The Peak of Inflated Expectations is being nice... way too nice. Don't get me wrong - I'm all about cool demos and pushing limits... but I think that it's pretty clear that Flash-based AR isn't even remotely feasible in 99.999% of todays markets and won't be until we see ubiquitous support for HD web cameras that capture at ~30fps (or better) with a reasonable price tag and requirements spec. When that happens do you think Flash will be able to keep up? hmmm.... the recent hardware acceleration team-ups with NVIDIA and Broadcom make total sense now!

In the meantime it's nice to see a few examples... but anything more than that is fuel to a fire of inflated expectations and disillusionment.

*EDIT: Gizmodo has a great preview of Microsoft's new HD Webcam dubbed LifeCam... that requires a dual core 3ghz machine to run it. Appears to be Windows 7 only... it's due sometime in mid September for <$100.