Entertainment TED Talks

Real-life augmented reality: Marco Tempest at TED2012

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Marco Tempest wowed the TED crowd yesterday, and now he’s back with an experiment, a demonstration of live augmented reality using the Kinect. This one is “technological magic” and we are advised to keep our eyes on the big screen.

Photos: Ryan Lash

Magic is deception we enjoy, he says. The audience must suspend its disbelief. It’s not difficult. The audience here is rapt.

Tempest quotes Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose face maps onto Marco’s own, a trick he repeats throughout the performance.

After some dazzling virtual magic, he concludes somewhat philosophically. “Our stories make us the people we are and sometimes the people we want to be,” he says. “They give us our identity and a sense of community. And, if a story is a good one, it might even make us smile.”