Oct 14, 2011

Augmented Reality

Over the last few days, we’ve talked about augmented reality through a few different lenses. We started off this series with a nod to Arnold Schwarzenegger and The Terminator.  In that movie, Arnold’s vision included something like a heads up display right in his mechno-biology.

 

That heads up display added a layer of information over elements in his environment.  The example we talked about briefly was the scene where he was measuring burly bikers’ clothes sizes to see if he find one that was just right for his Mr Universe Frame.   As he scanned each one of the bikers, a text block containing the biker’s clothes size and likelihood of a fit for Arnold was displayed.

That kind of augmented reality is what we’re going to discuss today and in large part throughout the rest of this series.  While the 3D images hovering over marker or markerless surfaces is likely to improve over time and eventually become commonplace, The Terminator type of augmented reality is here now.  You can access augmented reality information layering on your iPhone, iPad or Android based device today.   Granted, it isn’t the immersive type of experience you’d  experience with a pair of augmented reality goggles, glasses, or contacts.  But you are not going to have to pay thousands of dollars or start walking around with a goofy pair of goggles either.

I’ve pulled a few quotes from a very recent LA Times article to give you a true sense of what augmented reality looks and feels like today.

“You point your smartphone at an Italian restaurant, and diner reviews of its lasagna pop up on-screen.”   How’s that work?  GPS coordinates are passed along with an image of the restaurant to a server.  The photo of the location doesn’t matter as much as the coordinates, but it does add to the charm of the thing.  The app on the mobile determines the restaurant based upon the GPS coordinates (or less likely image) and returns search results which are painted on the screen right over the restaurant.

“Or you aim your tablet computer’s camera down a residential street, and over images of the houses you see which ones are for sale — along with the asking price, number of baths and square footage.” How’s that work? You already know the answer.  GPS coordinates, location information, coupled with a small amount of data available locally on the app allows the app  to do a search that returns, in this case, information about a house.

“Haven’t done this yet? You probably will soon.” This quote is the key!  You probably will soon.  The reality part of augmented reality right now, is that it is real. It can help, and it can be integrated into our existence in a very unobtrusive  fashion.

ABI Research reports that approximately 6 million augmented reality apps were downloaded last year.  This is just a sliver of the total number of apps downloaded, but the projections are for more than triple that number to 19 million this year and as much as a billion in less than 5 years.

Ok.  So now you’re armed with plenty of information to download a few apps and start researching augmented reality for yourself.   Doing so would be a great backgrounder for tomorrows post.  Tomorrow we’ll brainstorm a few app ideas, prepare to go through a brief design process, and create some wireframes for the augmented reality app we’ll build next week.  Between now and then, you should do a little personal brainstorming and start imagining apps that you or your customers would find useful.    Within a week or so, having one created won’t seem like science fiction anymore.