The Future of Augmented Reality

Yesterday, at Web 2.0, I attended a great panel session on augmented reality hosted by my friend John Havens. There was some lively discussion as the conversation turned from purely technical to philosophical.

Not to get too deep into the technology -- I've already discussed it here -- Funkadelic Advertising's Alex Smith did a write-up of some great examples of AR. Moving onto the philosophical, AR has some amazing potential as a next step into the world of the semantic Web, in which computers are finding and analyzing relevant information for humans rather than humans doing all of that work.

Envision a world where your camera-enabled mobile device -- or even AR-enabled glasses -- see and display additional "layers" of information onto the physical world. Imagine yourself walking down the street; it's approaching noon, and an AR display tells you that it's almost lunchtime and shows you highlighted overlays of eateries that are based on your previous dining habits, your dietary requirements (or limitations), your available checking account balance, and specials that certain restaurants may be running. Or you're on vacation in Disney World, and your AR device plots out the best walking route to see attractions based on their current waiting time, the ages and number of people in your party, proximity to a restroom, and shortest walking distance, all the while timing it so that you wind up near one of their restaurants at just the right time -- with a reservation set, based on your clicked confirmation. You walk through the souvenir shop and merely click on the items you want to buy, via e-commerce-driven virtual overalys, and have those items waiting for you in your hotel room when you return. Or imagine an AR version of HopStop showing you how to get to the Upper East in Manhattan, based not only on where you are but when the next subway car will reach the stop closest to you. If a subway line is delayed, it would reroute you to another subway or bus line that would get you there faster -- and point you there as you walk.

This may seem very "Minority Report" to you, but this is all possible with the right implementation of AR. Mind you, augmented reality, in its basic definition, has been around for a while. The audio device you listen to while on a museum tour is a way of augmenting your reality. This latest form of AR is just taking that to a whole new level.

As the session went on, I raised the issue of AR-app-overload. That is, as more and more services, sites, and marketers develop AR, they would each be creating more and more apps. I know for one, I don't want 47 different AR apps on my iPhone for 47 different uses. I brought up the idea of a consortium (or a big player like Amazon) coming up with an AR standard, whereby multiple clients would use the same AR interface/app. This then raises more challenges like, where would all this AR data be housed (locally? in the cloud?), and more importantly, would there need to then be an AR marker registry? Side note: a "marker" is the physical object -- usually a geometric shape -- that activates and orients the AR experience. In a single-app world, multiple companies would run the risk of using identical or very similar markers, thereby necessitating a marker registry.

This is the dawn of a very interesting technology that hopefully won't go the way of the dodo ... or the Second Life. I'd love to hear your comments. If you're interested, there is an AR Dev Camp that will be hosted near San Francisco and possibly one in New York City, both on December 5.

Update on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 6:26PM by Matthew Snodgrass

Cool implementation of AR for the VOODOO music festival in Louisiana.

Augmented Reality, the Next Big Thing

Last year, GE ever-so-quietly unveiled their Smart Grid campaign, which included an innocuous little link to their augmented reality demo of the smart grid. I must admit, at the time, I didn't give it a second thought. But then a really creative guy at Calliope Studios pointed it out to me, and I was thoroughly impressed.

Augmented reality, as it's been called, is a new virtualization technology that will be huge for marketing consumer products. Basically, you hold up a unique image icon in front of your Web camera, and the resulting image shows a three-dimensional Flash animation emerging from the hard-copy image. The image is typically a simple, 2D shape that's printed out and held up to the camera. If you have a Web camera, I encourage you to check out GE's example of it here. You can also see a not-so-hot implementation of it from P&G.

Believe me, it's going to be the big thing that all the kids will be talking about.