Digital Media Buzz > Real-Time Augmented Reality: Future or Fantasy?

Real-Time Augmented Reality: Future or Fantasy?

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By Ron Callari

While the nascent field of mobile Augmented Reality has made several jaw-dropping advances in the last year, for those who truly want to augment their daily lives with real-time updates, there are several hurdles that need to be overcome before this technology can become pervasive.

Using mobile phones equipped with AR software allows users to point their smartphones’ cameras or GPSs and obtain AR descriptors of whatever they are viewing, e.g. restaurants, nearest subway entrances, etc. The static overlays of data information that pop up can be supplied by Google, Wikipedia and other similar sites and are available on a number of apps like Wikitude, Layar and Nearest Tube.

However, when we want to know what is currently happening at that restaurant or subway in real time, that technology is just emerging. With real-time search in play, in addition to the static data overlays, the real-time readouts might say something like “our restaurant is totally booked, but we are taking a waiting list,” or in the case of the subway “the A train just left the station; next train in 6 minutes.”

So what what are the hurdles for this technology to become a standard offering? Robert Rice, CEO of Neogence and a thought leader and pioneer in the commercialization of augmented reality technologies for the global mobile market, believes that to cultivate and nurture the AR industry, basic parameters have to be established. While real-time search is emerging as a new feature, the field of Augmented Reality needs to define “basic standards, protocols and even a common lexicon.”

With duplication and overlap of several AR technologies arriving simultaneously on the scene, Mobilizy, an Austrian firm specializing in AR and location-based service solutions is proposing the creation of an augmented reality mark-up language. Similar to what HTML did for the Web, open Augmented Reality Mark-up Language (ARML) would establish a baseline language for mobile platforms.

“We are in a very similar situation now, with AR, as we were in the early days of HTML and the Web browser,” says Ray Selby, founder of Goaheadspace, a Web development consultancy in Amsterdam. “Every company may go their own way even though standards [like what Mobilizy is proposing] will aid everyone in development.” Selby thinks “the browser wars of the late 80s and early 90s” are fresh enough in our minds to remind us of the injurious proprietary systems set up by Microsoft and Netscape during that time period. He hopes that in the era of the mobile browser, all parties involved in AR “will collaborate and not sink to cut-throat competition.”

Getting Closer to Applied AR
While other burgeoning AR apps have only been able to aggregate data from external Web sources such as Google, for AR to really embrace a real-time search function it needs to have a feed that will provide the software with updates as they are occurring in real-time.

Sporting events are perfect venues to adapt this type of technology, and this past June Wimbeldon was the first major international arena to actually test it. The beta version of the Wimbeldon Seer developed by IBM, which runs on Google’s G1 smartphones provided fans at this past year’s matches with AR read-outs about what was being viewed during the tournament. The Seer’s features included match updates, players’ stats, newsfeeds, menu items available at the refreshment stands and could even tell you if the lines at a particular restroom were too long. All the real-time data on this system came from Wimbeldon’s own controlled channel.

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