At the end of last year, Forbes magazine asked frog design to help them envision the future in 2020. In December, they held a workshop in San Francisco that brought designers, futurists and journalists together to think about the current state of computing, how we might experience it 10 years from now and, perhaps most importantly, how we might make the transition into these possible futures. Take a guess at what technology was at the center of their vision, Augmented Reality.

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In the future nearly every visible thing will be cataloged and indexed, ready to be instantly identified and described to us. Want to go shopping? In the future we won’t need big retail stores with aisles of objects on display. We’ll be able to shop out in the world (see image, above). Do you like that new car you saw drive by? Or those cool shoes on the woman sitting across the room? All you’ll have to do is look at it and your mobile handset or AR-equipped eyeglasses will identify the object and look up the best price and retailer.

Like Google for our bodies, future technologies will allow us to monitor our body’s vital conditions and compute the outcome of our actions on-the-fly. So you’ll know right away what it’s going to take to work off that Burger and Coke.

Social networking and the exchange of personal information is just something that would also be revolutionized. Well all in all, the future looks bright, the future looks Augmented Reality.