Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the biggest buzzwords of today as we move towards what was previously only in the dreams of science fiction novels and movies. Augmented Reality is the technology which enhances our view of the world with useful information about what we see, similar to how a HUD works in military aircraft and in FPS video games.
Augmented Reality is as much a part of science fiction as virtual reality, but for years it is something we've been trying to shift fully into everyday life. The term "Augmented Reality" was first coined in 1992 but it wasn't until around 10 years later that GeoVector (with the help of Microsoft, HP, and Vodafone) produced an application for PDAs which utilised data from GPS combined with information from their "race" servers so that people could use this application to see information about boats in the race.
Over the years since then we've not really seen a great deal of advancements in AR, or implementations of the idea. Now, in 2009, we're starting to see a sudden surge in popularity for Augmented Reality. This surge in popularity comes from phones such as the iPhone, Blackberry and Android based phones having not just cameras, but also GPS and the ability to create applications for them. With the GPS the phone can determine it's current location, and through the camera it can use what you can currently see without having to create a 3D reconstruction of it. Rather than using image recognition on what the camera sees it combines an approximate depth of field based on the specs of the camera along with your co-ordinates to calculate how far away from you specific pieces of information are. The iPhone also has a digital compass which means the information can be made all the more accurate by it knowing which direction you are facing.
So with greater accessibility to hardware that can support this technology and a larger developer base it does mean it's likely that after all this time AR is something which can finally succeed and be used in our day lives. I think one of the most likely AR applications to succeed will be acrossair's Nearest Tube application just because it is the sort of application that enhances everyday life with something which is useful - a method of helping us with finding the correct metro / underground lines when travelling. Initially travel based applications and social media based applications are likely to be the areas where AR will succeed quicker and where it's likely to get most of it's development time due to those areas being popular with people who use mobile applications.
When you load the app, holding it flat, all 13 lines of the London underground are displayed in coloured arrows. By tilting the phone upwards, you will see the nearest stations: what direction they are in relation to your location, how many kilometres and miles away they are and what tube lines they are on. If you continue to tilt the phone upwards, you will see stations further away, as stacked icons.
At the time of writing acrossair are looking for beta testers to test Nearest Tube in the San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Madrid and Barcelona areas (at the minute they are only looking for iPhone 3GS users as they don't currently support the 3G) - they already have sufficient testers for New York.
Augmented Reality could be brought into every field though - medicine students could one day use such technology to identify different organs just by holding their phone in front of a subject, just as this could work in training students of many other fields. People interested in astronomy can use this technology to identify star patterns and to identify the names of any stars, planets or other named objects. As more developers try out the idea of AR we're likely to see these applications being made, and I'd hazard a guess that if the Apple App Store starts to accept AR applications then the number of them is likely to explode quite quickly.
This technology also has military applications as it could be used to identify targets and landmarks by troops. As unfortunate as it is that such technology could be used to aid in the killing of others it will likely be argued that it could also save lives. What's amazing though is that what information could be displayed and found useful by troops could also be found useful by drivers looking for a place using SatNav (which maybe with AR could show direction arrows on your windscreen and then an overlay of information about the target destination when you get there) or by people interested in social media who want to be able to see where there friends are (such as TwittARound).
Although at the minute AR isn't generally available on the iPhone, it is for Google's Android phones. Wikitude World Browser is one such application which supports over 350,000 points of interest and will display information for any of them when detected by your location and the direction your facing using the GPS and accelerometer. One point of interest here is that the developers do say it will be coming out on the iPhone shortly, though I guess they're assuming they'll manage to get it in the App Store. They're also trying to stimulate AR development with their own API which I suppose will eventually be competing with ARToolkit.
ARToolKit is a software library for building Augmented Reality (AR) applications. These are applications that involve the overlay of virtual imagery on the real world. For example, in the image to the right a three-dimensional virtual character appears standing on a real card. It can be seen by the user in the head set display they are wearing. When the user moves the card, the virtual character moves with it and appears attached to the real object.
In more recent news it does seem Apple may be starting to take AR seriously as it's being reported that in the 3.1 Beta 2 SDK there is now the ability to use live video feeds in your applications though due to NDA's it is hard to get a confirmed report as to whether this is true.
I think AR could also extend to gaming though at the minute I could only think of this working with RPGs under specific conditions. Of course this would come with it's own set of problems - if for example it displayed people as zombies using some clever overlay then any imbalanced individuals yearning for violence may start attacking real people. I doubt this would happen, but it would of course get blamed on the technology or game instead of the individual. At the minute there is already an AR game called ARhrrr on the nVidia Tegra which is used with a street map on a sheet of paper to produce a 3D environment which alters as the camera moves across the paper. The purpose of this game is to kill the zombies and to save the humans. An example of an AR game on the iPhone is ARf - a virtual pet.
I think our obsession with AR at the minute comes from out own fond memories of seeing it used in popular culture such as Terminator and other science fiction movies. Once the current craze has died down we might start to see the true value of this amazing technology.
