(NYC/SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA) May 31, 2017 Membit, the first App that allows anyone to create precisely placed augmented reality anywhere without a marker, today announced the call for entries for the First Augmented Reality Hall of Fame at AWE 2017 today in Santa Clara, California. The designated inductees will appear as lager than life membits within the actual hall at AWE 2017 and remain forever.
A sample of the first iteration of inductees will be unveiled tomorrow at AWE 2017 by Membit’s CEO Jay Van Buren. Download the Membit app at http://get.membit.co and search #halloffame to see the AR Hall of Fame in the front entrance of the convention center. He will discuss how and why Membit is the perfect app for creating an augmented hall of fame in his talk “Annotating the World with the Human Positioning System ™” 4:30pm – 4:45pm on June 2nd.
Membit is confident Augmented Reality has become an important new form of communication. “The Best of Augmented Reality” has already contributed to the story of humanity and will contribute in coming years in ways can only begin to imagine.
Within the history of this young medium, we believe there are individuals who deserve to be immortalized in recognition of their important contribution to AR becoming reality. These are people who have made Augmented Reality possible – by both creating and building this industry. Membit recognizes without the contributions and brilliance of these people there would be no Augmented Reality as we know it today.
The 2017 Inductees Are:
Tom Caudell & David Mizell 
In 1990, Boeing researchers Tom Caudell and David Mizell first coined the term “augmented reality” to describe a digital display used by aircraft electricians that blended virtual graphics onto a physical reality
Ori Inbar
Ori has been an enterprising champion of the augmented reality industry since 2007. He established Games Alfresco – a leading augmented reality blog that helped popularize AR, and in 2010 co-founded the Augmented World Expo (Formerly ARE) – the world’s largest and most influential conference for AR – now in its 5th year
Steve Mann
Steve, often referred to as the father of wearable computing, is a researcher and inventor best known for his work on computational photography, particularly wearable computing and high dynamic range imaging. Always a fan-favorite for his spectacular demos he has been an inspiration to a whole generation of AR researchers. He is currently Chief Scientist at Meta
Jacki Morie
AR pioneer Jacki Morie’s 30 year career combines art and technology with an emphasis on how technology can be used to further human ends such as empathy through experiential learning. She was a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Creative Technologies before starting All These Worlds.
Tish Shute
Tish has taken a leading role in the emergence of augmented and virtual reality into the consumer market. She is Co-Founder of Augmented Reality Event (ARE) & Augmented World Expo (AWE) – now in its 8th year and the world’s largest event focused on AR, VR, and MR. She also co-founded Augmented Reality.ORG, a global not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing AR & VR
Jun Rekimoto
Jun is a researcher, inventor and futurist who has published more than a hundreds articles in the area of human-computer interactions. He invented marker based AR, using QR code-based targets in 1996 begining the world of Marker-based AR that we know today. He is a professor at the University of Tokyo
Bruce Sterling
Writer, speaker, futurist Bruce Sterling has been called “the prophet of AR” and is cited as an inspiration to some of the bigest movers and shakers of the AR world. He has been a previous Keynote speaker at AWE and currently blogs for WIRED at Beyond the Beyond.
“This is an open call to others who want to help, we are only aware of parts of the story. We propose that we induct 5-10 people each year into the Hall of Fame and we are forming a group to administer it, to take in nominations and have a vote each year.” said Membit CEO Jay Van Buren. “We are starting this Augmented Reality Hall of Fame but we need the entire technology and business community to participate!”
Here are some of the types of contributions we are discussing for inclusion:
Vision & Organization
There are people who have shown the way through what they’ve imagined through academic papers, novels, articles and speeches. And through bringing people together in organizations and groups, creating consensus and working to create standards and protocols
Technology & Research
There are people who have brought Augmented Reality out of a dream and into reality by doing scientific research and by crafting the hardware and software that make augmented reality technically possible.
Commerce and Content
There are people who have made Augmented Reality possible by creating business models, by taking risks, investing time, intelligence, social and monetary capital into this industry. And there are people who have made augmented reality worthwhile by making something worth seeing and worth caring about.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of the types of contributions that one might make to deserve being in the AR Hall of Fame, but it’s a start. We can use to guide our thinking and add more categories over time. Without any of these people there would be no Augmented Reality and world would be a less amazing place for it.
About Membit
Membit ™ is a new way to share memories. When you make a membit, you leave an image in place for other Membit users to find and enjoy. With Membit, you can share the past of a place with the present, or share the present of a place with the future. Membit is a geolocative photo sharing app that allows pictures to be placed and viewed in the exact location they were captured. Membit’s patented Human Positioning System (TM) allows for markerless Augmented Reality to be used anytime, anywhere, by anyone.“About as close as we got to seeing a time machine at TC Disrupt.” One of the 20 most fascinating iOS apps from TechCrunch Disrupt,” MacWorld. Membit is available for iphone and ipad. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @membitinc for updates and for more information, please visit us at ww.memebit.co
MEDIA CONTACT
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James Pearson
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BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
jay@membit.co
Jay Van Buren
