By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

Tonight at 75 Varick Street in New York two groups came together the desperately needed to meet – the Augmented Reality group and the Semantic Web Meetup.

The event called the The Augmented Lounge was organized by John C. Havens and Marco Neuman to highlight the need for the two groups to begin a dialogue about their collective work. The Semantic Web is the working meta layer and Augmented Reality is the future of the display layer.

Im not sure that either group would simplify the body of their work down to this level but at the core these are the functionalities that they provide.

With plenty of food and drink (n/a) available and a medium size room to hold them the groups began to speak awkwardly together like two singles on a blind date. But all got rolling when someone made the first Apple vs. Microsoft joke when on queue the presentation computer running Windows crashed the browser.

The conversation quickly found its way down a path that included the outernet, visualization technology, open letters, the AR consortium and usefulness of Google Wave as a framework technology for many real-time applications.

I’ll have more on the event tomorrow. But the conversation stayed civil and no doubt there are some interesting collaborations that will come from it.

(Please excuse typos as I am blogging this from my phone.)

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4