Augmented Reality: Where are we and where is it going?
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Written by Olivier Adam (France); Edited by Rejean Bourgault (Canada), Co-founders of 5Deka Inc. – All Rights Reserved
I am pretty sure that you have heard about Augmented Reality in the past few months or so as it has become the new trendy buzzword. But unlike a lot of buzzword from before (Multimedia in the 90s, web2.0 a few years ago, etc.) Augmented Reality actually means some new advancement in technology and will require a completely different behaviour from the users. The term Augmented Reality is said to have been around for nearly 20 years now, but real applications have only existed for 2 years or so (there was a few attempts in the earlier years, but nothing available to the mass consumers until recently). Also, it has only become very clear of what could become of Augmented Reality in the past 2 years as many articles and research projects centered on this concept have been going on. We will first have a look at what exactly Augmented Reality is and we will separate the different technologies in two categories. After, we will look at actual working examples of Augmented Reality and we will finish this article with a view on the future of Augmented Reality and where it could bring us.
How Augmented Reality works
First, let’s define what Augmented Reality is. Augmented Reality (AR) represents the addition of information to a view of the real world; hence the term augmented which means a view of the real world that contains even more information. It could be a view of the real world with a “layer” of information on top of it that comes from the Internet, or vice versa (an environment that exists in the Internet that uses information from the real world around you to interact). Notice that we use the word layer in apostrophe as in some cases, the layers can be so well merged that it becomes hard to make the distinction between both. Those two ways of presenting AR represents for us two different categories of applications and potential use. The first, using a view of the real world to which we have added information that usually comes from the Internet shows more practical potential, both for personal and business applications. On the other side, the possibility to interact in an environment based on the Internet with real life objects caters more to the entertainment and leisure industry and we see less business potential coming from that side.
For the first category of application, there are many ways to add information to a real life view. The most common nowadays is to take your camera equipped cell phone and look on the screen at the view that you have behind. The cell phone will process the information coming from the camera, go on the internet to gather extra information and will add a layer to the picture you see to give you an Augmented Reality view. Similar concepts would use the car windshield with a camera mounted somewhere on the front of the car with assistance from a good GPS system. In the future you will also see the use of sophisticated glasses or “LCD type contact lenses”; basically anything on which information could be displayed that is between your eyes and the real world.
For the second category, most system nowadays use some type of marker system that allows a camera to record the interaction you have with the object (on which the markers are positioned) and then process the information to properly reflect the interaction you have on the screen. The markers can be of many forms but common ones are either 3D barcode, or some specifically sh aped marker that wouldn’t be found in nature normally (a series of coloured dots, etc.). An improved way of doing this type of Augmented reality is coming out very soon (with some prototypes already available) and will not require any type of markers as the camera will now be able to differentiate the distance between objects and what is static and what is moving (and recognize different type of objects by itself).