What is Augmented Reality?

The seamless visual integration of location-based digital content with the real world represents a significant opportunity to rethink the array of human factors that affect how we interact with technology. AR gives us-ers a way to effortlessly tap into a wide range of location-based content, and to experience that content in a way that is closer to how they experience the real world.

Over the next 5 years AR technologies will enable a new generation of useful, entertaining and immersive mobile applications. A simple AR application might annotate buildings on a skyline with their names and links to web pages, or overlay menus and reviews on the fronts of restaurants, bars, and coffee shops on a city street. AR navigation will make getting to your destination easier than ever before, with directions overlaid directly on the street itself. Rich visual tours of cities, museums, and college campuses will make exploring new surroundings less daunting and more fun.

WHY AUGMENTED REALITY?

Augmented reality (AR) brings digital content to life by blending information, graphics, and other media with a person’s view of the world in real-time. AR allows users to call up, interact with and visualize data in the most natural way possible: by looking around them.

WHAT IS AUGMENTED REALITY?

AR systems utilize advanced geo-location technol-ogies to anchor a variety of content such as text, images, video, 3D graphics and animations to spe-cific locations in the real world. A location could be the surface of a table, a street corner, the side of a building, or even a point hovering in mid-air. When accessing AR content, users view both the real world and digital enhancements through an AR en-abled mobile device such as a smartphone. This model for accessing and visualizing information opens the door to a new class of user interfaces that are more intuitive and immersive than ever before.

More advanced applications will draw upon AR’s capa-bility to be multi-user and host user-generated content.

For example, architects and communities will be able to visualize proposed construction projects on-site be-fore breaking ground. Advanced educational tools such as 3D modeling and visualization will be accessible for a fraction of the cost of current solutions. New law enforcement and civil defense applications will make our streets safer and more friendly. Computer and video games will take place in parks or arenas where play-ers will interact through movement rather than a keyboard or mouse.

© 2009 Omniar Inc.

THE AUGMENTED REALITY INDUSTRY

LOOKING FORWARD

These recent developments have attracted a number of new entrants to the AR industry, bringing with them increased attention from analysts, bloggers, researchers, and techno-geeks. Consumer awareness, in turn, is quickly expanding. By 2012-2015, consumers will expect mobile AR to be robust, accessible, and widespread.

The total addressable market for augmented re-ality is massive, with a projected 560 million AR capable smartphones worldwide in 2012. Mean-while, the market for location-based services is projected to increase from $515 Million in 2008 to $13 Billion in 2013. Exciting advances in wear-able display technologies will one day move AR beyond the bounds of two-dimensional screens for a truly immersive experience. When these facts are viewed in the context of AR’s power to redefine how we think about human factors and technology, it is not hard to see why augmented reality has captured the imagination of so many researchers, developers, and companies.

Early mobile AR applications have relied primarily on GPS/compass/ accelerometer based systems to determine a per-son’s approximate position and what they are looking at. There are fundamental drawbacks to this approach, howev-er, including visual inaccuracies and jitter. A different breed

of small-scale augmented reality systems, based on pattern recognition and marker tracking, are being used within a number of novelty and mar-keting applications. These systems achieve high accuracy, but are limited in their scalability and usefulness across a variety of applications. Within the AR industry the need for a robust and flexible vision-based AR system for mobile devices is widely recognized.

While the concept of augmented reality has existed for de-cades within science fiction, research labs and the military, AR is only now becoming technologically feasible for wide-scale consumer adoption. Improvements to smartphones and data networks are driving this shift, with increasingly accurate GPS, in-phone cameras, and built in compasses acting as important enablers.

Given daily advancements in mobile device tech-nology and the promise of lightning fast 4G wire-less data networks reaching maturity in the next 1-2 years, fully functional AR is rapidly approaching. Combined with an im-minent spike in consumer awareness, the stage is set for aug-mented reality to transform the way we interact with informa-tion, the world, and each other.

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© 2009 Omniar Inc.