Standardized Augmented Reality Code Far From Reality
Posted: October 30, 2009
By Ron Callari
Augmented Reality is the blend of the real and virtual worlds, and when combined with mobile devices it has developed applications in nearly every industry that can virtually revolutionize the fields of advertising, entertainment, education, military and emergency services, architecture, medicine, manufacturing, business, conferencing, navigation and tourism.
However while the application side of the equation is growing exponentially, very little coding has been established to standardize the underbelly of AR. ARML specification for Augmented Reality is analogous to HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) for the Web, which is the encoding scheme used to create and format a Web document. A user need not be an expert programmer to make use of HTML for creating hypertext documents that can be uploaded to the Internet.
Today, with AR literally becoming more and more a “reality” on mobile apps, the same type of process is under development to devise a standardized encoding language for Augmented Reality.
Since AR for mobile devices is a nascent field, the work underway to address ARML was just begun in 2009. The Open Geospatial Consortium Inc., an international consensus standards group (OAG) is spearheading this initiative and leading the development of standards for geospatial and location-based services.
The purpose for establishing an open ARML specification is to assure all data created for augmentation in the physical world could be universally accessed and viewed on any augmented reality browser.
KML or Keyhole Markup Language is an XML-based language schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization on existing and future Web-based, two and three-dimensional browsers such as Google Earth. Since many companies and organizations have their geo-data already available on KML, the Consortium’s consensus is that it makes perfect sense to KML as the base platform and then enrich the new mark-up coding of ARML with custom extensions.
Robert Rice, chairman of the AR Consortium and CEO of Neogence Enterprises notes, “It is too soon to establish a formal standard, but now is the critical early stage to be thinking about one and exploring different approaches. A full standard for mark-up languages and scripting will naturally emerge over time as the technology matures.”
When questioned as to the hurdles standing in the way of development, Rice says, “there are some elements to the technology that need to improve or advance a bit. The great majority of AR right now is still in the universities and part of research projects. While the commercial AR industry is growing at light speed, it is still barely newborn.” He adds, “things will be dramatically different in less than a year.”
The sheer number of AR business models may be another reason why the adoption of one mark-up language to suit all is in a stalled position. This year, according to Gary Haynes, founder of Muvedesign, a virtual environmental design company, there are 16 Augmented Reality Business Models that include various AR players and their applications.
Pascal Mobuchon, vp of technology at Total Immersion, believes that performance may be one of the main challenges. “As for all standardized language and especially for the ones that have to be near real time (for video capture and superimposition) the performance is one of the key points to be addressed before being accepted by the community.”
Loading ...