The following is an edited transcript of an interview with William Hurley, chief technology officer of Chaotic Moon Studios in Austin. Hurley and his team are harnessing the power of emerging technologies and making them accessible on your cell phone. In this interview, he spoke about the future of augmented reality. Click here to listen to the interview (wav file).

WEB EXCLUSIVE: When you look at the development of technology and think about [how traditionally it] comes from the military and the very expensive research projects [before] it eventually makes it down [to the general public], augmented reality is actually kind of going in the reverse. It's actually being driven by individual developers, small companies, startups and consumers because that technology is now readily available.

The convergence of smart phones that have a compass and an accelerometer has shifted the balance of technological power, and in doing that, I think you'll see more things driven by individuals and more advances coming out of smaller companies than you will out of your traditional large research firms or the military industrial complex.

As one of the leading developers of augmented reality applications, we're very excited for all of the new hardware platforms. For the last few years, you've seen a very advanced set of software emerging, a lot of open source for doing AR and a lot of good development in that area, but the hardware has kind of been lacking.

For example, there are several manufacturers that have phones right now that don't have an accelerator or a compass, and those are kind of prerequisites. I think that the hardware's finally catching up with the software at the current time and that this is going to enable a bunch of new innovation.

It's important to understand the difference between innovation and invention, and right now we don't necessarily need people inventing new things; we need people to just innovate the products that they have so that developers have the technical capabilities to deliver on some of the big dreams of you've seen in [the movies] Blade Runner or Star Wars with augmented reality.

I think it's important to know that augmented reality is not an industry. A lot of people think it is. It's been around for 18 years, and the reason it's never developed into an industry like social media or the Internet is because of the fact that augmented reality isn't a technology that you can build an industry around. It's a technology that should be pervasive through all industries. They can all use it, and so I think now that you see the technology getting into the hands of individual developers, you will start seeing that made into applications as far-reaching as farming to biomedical science and banking to geo location.

I think ten years from now you'll probably see it become pervasive, so it won't be something we look at as a fascinating technology, but it'll be something that's just integrated into everything we do.

Right now, there are several motor companies that are working on windshields that have heads-up displays for information or data. Ford has a car that uses SYNC that actually will display your Twitter string. Don't know if that's a great idea; I'm sure all the insurance companies have their own opinions on it, but you'll just start seeing it become ingrained in everything.

If I were to look out 15 years, I would say the technology I'd be most looking for is projection technology. We're trying to develop display screens that allow three-dimensional displays from flat surfaces... different technologies [will] allow us to visualize data and have more of the things you see in the [movies] Minority Report or a Star Wars.

I think if I were to leave somebody with the impression of what they should look for in augmented reality, I think that they should start seeking out apps that are less trivial and start looking for apps that actually have some function or purpose. I think consumers need to start demanding more out of the application providers.

At Chaotic Moon Studios, we strive to really deliver above and beyond the expectations, but we wouldn't be able to do it without people in your audience pushing us for better and better uses of the technology that are actually more applicable in the real world.