I’m here with my next big analysis. It’s Augmented Reality for this time. This post will concentrate on the following topics:
Minority Report, the movie that conceptualized the Augmented Reality concept was the first to show us how it can be used and how it can transform the way we interact with objects in real world. The seed has now grown into a tree and the technology is now in your smartphone. So, let me get started with what Augmented Reality is all about and how much of impact is has got on us.
What is Augmented Reality?
A little history:
Augmented Reality is a term coined 19 years ago, coined by Tom Caudell, a researcher at Boeing. He came up with this term when he was working on a project to make it easier to assemble large bundles of electric wire for an aircraft on the floor.
Defining AR:
Wikipedia Says:
Augmented Reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imaginary – creating a mixed reality.
In a one-liner:
Augmented reality connects real world objects with that of the Computer Generated graphics.
In other words, Augmented Reality is the ability to give the real world objects tagged data or projected properties.
The concept has been visualized in many Hollywood movies, as I said, one good example is the Minority Report, showing scenes of Tom Cruise interacts with virtual reality to get his data.
And in reality, we’ve seen Pranav Mistry’s revolutionary Sixth Sense device and Kinect. I’ve blogged earlier about the Sixth Sense device, Invisible Computer Mouse and Kinect hacks, which has bought AR to the consumers.
Types of Augmented Reality:
My analysis on Augmented reality yielded 3 major types of Augmented Reality:
- Desktop
- This works with some desktop applications, and a webcam (indeed). Metaio, a desktop app which shows animated 3D data on screen capturing images from your webcam is the best example of desktop AR. As far as I analyzed, the desktop versions of AR Apps are just for fun.
- Mobile
- Smartphone has reached its heights already. Trends show that 1 out of 5 mobile phone users are smartphone users. Augmented Reality seeped into the smartphone sector about 3 years before. The augmented reality mobile apps uses the phone’s camera to render live video and apply a layer of augmented objects to serve the appropriate purpose. Wikitude is considered to be one of the best AR app for smartphone. Using AR, we can know the nearest gas station, malls, or whatever we are looking for. All you need to do is to fire the app and it will show you all the nearest places. Here’s a video of how some AR Apps work on your phone. Read more to know how these apps work.
- Glasses
- This type of AR is more of the Head Mounted Display (HMD) instead of phones and desktop apps.This also uses location based services and projects the augmented objects in your HMD, making you feel like you are in a real augmented world. Sounds awesome right? Yes. It is awesome! 🙂
- Automotive
- Yes! BMW is one company that has made real use of Augmented Reality. Now, most of the recently unveiled BMW cars come with some sensors, that tell where the problem is in the system in case of any breakdown. And the company provides its own app for iPhone, which when pointed at the repaired part. One other alternative that BMW has given is a Google, that acts more of a HMD that would augment the parts and give you voice directed information to fix the breakdown! The video below shows how this works!
Why should we care about AR?
Augmented reality is already a part of your life now. I’m sure you watch a lot of sport matches. The sports broadcast teams use Augmented Reality to project information right on top of the field to analyze some shots, etc., AR is turning out to be the future of Education and the Future of literacy. Writing history directly on reality is not too far. Augmented Reality is not the simple concept you think of projections and augmentations. It’s all about bridging reality and virtuality in the user’s hands.
Our fantasy of “What if walls talk?” is now over. They actually can, but all we need to do is to correctly configure them and tag the walls with appropriate properties to augment. Imagine a world with full of hyperlinks that are linked with all the useful information. The entire world would be nested with information, with one link leading to another.
But as far as I expect, all that I can predict in near future is:
- A conference room with augmented documents
- Book’s Index pages that give you a glimpse of what’s in for the reader
- Food items that can tell you how much calories are present in them
- Roads instructing you to your destination
- Walls acting like your computer monitors.
In the education and literacy perspective, AR will bring the written literacy with visual literacy together. There are a lot of things that we could think of in AR. But let me restrict to all these listed above. Keep looking for the sequel of this analysis soon.
Next Up: How can Augmented Reality be used in reality?