No one is asking you to give up your opinions, just the words you use to express them

Fag means hate.

I was responding to you agreeing with another contributor who claims to be sick of LGBT people looking for ‘special privileges’. The same contributor then goes on to trivialise the very real problems of bullying and discrimination that gay people face by comparing it to being teased for having red hair.

That kind of statement irks me greatly because any fair or reasonable examination of the facts would show that far from looking for ‘special rights’ (which is a buzzword of the christian fundamentalists in the US), we have yet to fully secure equality under the law despite the fact that a large majority of Irish people support such a concept. And that kind of glib ‘special rights’ comment is further undermined when you consider such simple things as same-sex couples being afraid to hold hands in public for fear of being met with verbal abuse or worse – something straight couples do not even have to think twice about.

In terms of ‘community’, I was referring to the LGBT community, which I am happy to consider myself a part of. Society is made up of many different groups and it does not follow that by identifying with a particular group, you are marginalising yourself.

And I accept you are not anti-gay but please recognise that the battle for equality is a real and necessary one.

Soon….

My father told me at the time ‘how we dealt with our problems without disclosing them too or involving anyone else was a display of character… That I would ruin my chances of a future if anyone at my university found out… and mocked me in front of friends saying I might as well move to the USA, get a dog psychic and go on Jerry springer’

Such attitudes are why I came to realize I needed councilling

The basics of augmented reality are dead simple, if your visual device has enough tilt sensors an inbuilt compass and GPS Receiver you can take any virtual object located at co-ordinates x, y and z and properly draw that in respect to your location and line of sight.

Generally though, this will look unbelievably crap because it wouldn’t know when an object, such as a building, should be blocking your view of the virtual object or when an object in the environment should be casting a shadow on the virtual object.

If your Google though, you can make augmented reality look decent as you’ve already got info on the basic geometry of each building in some cities, so a Google augmented reality system should be able to decently hide the virtual object when its blocked by a building or cast a shadow from a nearby building correctly onto it depending on the time of day and weather reports.

Of course, the building geometry data will be far from perfect and could easily become outdated and such a system would never be able to consider any other objects that should be affecting your view of the virtual object. So unless these goggles pack some sort of object detection technology (which may explain the €250 to €600 price tag) then in my opinion they would still be not worth it.

Regardless, it’s a start, there are countless technologies and system designs that could enhance the augmented reality experience. Would be simultaneously hilarious and disturbing what you could do if such a device had face recognition.