Will Augmented Reality (AR) allow us to access digital information, experience others' stories, and thus explore alternate realities? AR has recently attracted attention again due to the rapid advances in related multimedia technologies as well as various glass-type AR display devices. However, in order to widely adopt AR in alternated realities, it is necessary to improve various core technologies and integrate them into an AR platform. Especially, there are several remaining technical challenges such as 1) real-time recognition and tracking of multiple objects while generating an environment map, 2) organic user interface with awareness of user's implicit needs, intentions or emotion as well as explicit requests, 3) immersive multimodal content augmentation and just-in-time information visualization, 4) multimodal interaction and collaboration during augmented telecommunication, etc. In addition, in order to encourage user engagement and enable an AR ecosystem, AR standards should be established that support creating AR content, capturing user experiences, and sharing the captured experiences. What about humans in that regard? Are humans ready to live happily in the age of alternate realities? Even if humans actively use AR in their daily lives to explore alternate realities, overuse can lead to passive lives like avatars, rather than improving efficiency or expanding their abilities. In other words, such a high dependence on the AR can contribute towards degrading or even losing human's abilities and ultimately lower the quality of life (QoL). Though technology has been developed as a tool to expand humans' abilities and improve QoL, sometimes technology is seen as a threat to overwhelm or replace human. In addition, sometimes technology addiction causes humans to be isolated or alienated from society. If so, what do humans gain and lose, if they actively use AR as a tool to access, manipulate, and maintain a variety of information through place or objects of interest (PoI or OoI) in alternate realities? Will future humans rather be Homo Deus or humans who rely less and less on their intellectual capabilities? How should we prepare for the future where human, reality and alternate realities co-exist? An Augmented Human (AH) is a person who is able to use AR effectively to expand the physical, intellectual and social abilities of the user [1,2]. How then can a human become an AH? First, the AH platform, the bridge between human and AH, needs a personalized agent that understands and represents the human [3,4,5]. The agent monitors the human's actions and reactions, negotiate with other agents on behalf of the human, and provide appropriate alternatives to make appropriate choices or decisions. The agent constantly collects and analyzes the signals of various sensors over a long period of time to construct a digital twin with Holistic Quantified Self (HQS) that consists of 1) a physical condition, 2) an emotional status, 3) a social relationship status, and 4) a digital consumption behavior status. Consequently, the agent is ready to act as a personalized companion by monitoring the individual's digital personality by observing HQS patterns and changes over time. In this keynote, I introduce the current states of AR and VR and then explain the implications of AR /VR as a new medium or platform that extends human abilities beyond time and space [6,7,8,9,10]. In particular, I explain the potential of VR/AR combined with Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 3D digital maps, and discuss various possible applications in everyday life where 'reality and alternated realities' coexist. Finally, I will look at the future of humans in the alternated realities era and share my view on possible AH technology capable of broadening human' s physical, intellectual and social abilities.
