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

Real-Time Augmented Reality: Future or Fantasy?

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In order for these types of real-time AR apps to be effective, tech departments need to do the hard work of tagging the world, otherwise the apps have no data to pull from. In this case, IBM tagged all of Wimbledon. After the installation, the Android G1’s pop-up windows recognized the tags and issued the real-time updates.

Moving this technology forward also requires that the hardware become AR-capable. Andrew Plimmer, CEO of HIT Lab NZ Ltd. is an electronics and embedded software engineer with extensive tech business experience including running multi-national businesses for Fortune 200 corporations. He believes that because of the level of real-time processing required, “the major issue right now are the mobile operating systems, which will require handset manufacturers to support more of a true smartphone architecture.

“We have been doing real-time augmented reality [using vision processing] on handsets for several years, but the real scale will occur when the majority of users have AR-capable handsets,” Plimmer notes.

How To Implement AR
There is huge variance across markets right now in different geographic markets. “In Europe, the strength of Nokia has made it an attractive market for true AR applications, whereas in north Asia the handsets run fundamentally different operating systems, and in North America even the recent dominant handsets tend to either be iPhone [which prohibits camera stream processing] and devices that only support Java-based apps [which tend to be too slow for accepted user experience],” Plimmer says.

In this area, Plimmer thinks a potential game changer is Google. “They have all of the critical elements in place — a mobile operating system that is steadily gaining market share, a mass of location-aware data, and the resources to deploy such a system. If they chose to do it then I would estimate they could do the handset part of the equation [without vision processing] within a day or so.”

Total Immersion is a software solutions provider with a proprietary AR technology that has been in development since 1999. In speaking with Eric Gehl, COO for the firm, he asserts that to gain reliable interactivity and content overlay “we have to be sure of the exact target position and a way to achieve that goal is to use the camera as a recognition sensor to ensure adequate precision.”

The second step is to separate the different phases of the process:

1. Image recognition
2. Tracking
3. Content generation
4. Final rendering on the mobile phone

Step 1 is initialized by taking a picture, which is sent to a server through the mobile network. A large database is able to recognize thousands of pictures, which then triggers an action when the sent image is matched with one in the database (Step 2).

Step 3, or content generation, is the necessary component to updating AR with real-time data via a real-time content database (new website, RSS stream, etc.). This step generates content that is fully adapted to the location and the time the picture is taken. This content is then sent back to the mobile phone (Step 4). It is of course possible to add advertising content depending on the business model.

Gehl believes the “new generation of mobile phones … are fully compliant in terms of processing power and resources for the entire scale of AR applications.” He adds, “the next generation mobile networks [4G/LTE] will even increase the capabilities in terms of data stream and bandwidth, but also with shorten delays supporting instant client server interactions.”

The future of blending real-time search with AR is tasking a lot of smart people to make our smartphones smarter with each passing day. While much of this technology seems to be evolving randomly in various sectors of the globe, there does seem to be a consensus among the sources interviewed for this story that there is a strong need for uniformity and collaboration amid the software developers, the mobile device manufacturers and the growing populace of  “augmented reality” enthusiasts at large. At the end of the day, the evolution of this type of technology is not so much how information can be provided, but what do people care about enough to sustain a commercial market.

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