Apps showing more than reality!
What is it?
Most applications designed for creating “augmented reality” - AR for short - project digital data on a real-life environment. It’s reminiscent of the different layers (e.g. containing photos or drawings of buildings) which Google Earth projects over its satellite images. The difference is that with AR we’re talking about the real world, not satellite images...
There are some AR applications in the military and medical world already, but they’ve started appearing in industry too. For example, mechanics can have instructions for repairing the engine of a broken-down car projected on a special pair of spectacles. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5ywMb6SeGc). A similar technique is applied in expensive cars, where the driver can see all kinds of information - for instance traffic information - projected on the front window (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94dg2D-jAhM).
Here are some more modest applications which can already assist the common user.
On smartphones
One of the best-known smartphone apps making use of AR is Layar (http://www.layar.com - for iOS, Android and others). Here is how it works. Point your smartphone camera at a specific point. Thanks to GPS and a compass, Layar will know exactly what you’re looking at, and on this basis an online server sends tourist, commercial or other information to your device. Layar then projects this data as a virtual layer on top of your camera images. Tip. At http://www.layar.com/catalog you can find a full list of such layers: we found almost 2,700 different ones, many of which were for use in the UK.
Another popular app is Wikitude World Browser (http://www.wikitude.com - for Android, iOS and Symbian, amongst others): it’s an online encyclopaedia which provides information on the objects you’re currently watching via your smartphone camera.
The developers have in the meantime also added Wikitude Drive: they claim it’s the world’s first AR navigation system, which projects the driving directions directly on actual pictures of the road. The app is currently limited to use on Android devices in the UK, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.
Needless to say there are AR games too, but they are generally lacking in creativity: at best they are simple shooting games, such as Mosquitoes or Arcade Reality.
Computer + webcam
For another form of AR you can use your computer, on condition that you have a webcam. A well-known example is the Ray-Ban Virtual Mirror (http://www.ray-ban.com/uk): point the webcam at yourself and you will see a virtual mirror where you can try out different models of spectacles projected onto your own video image. “Interactive paper”, as it were, but it does offer opportunities for publishers and marketeers.
You can find a number of fun, commercial, AR animations on http://demos.t-immersion.com and on http://www.beyondreality.nl/demos.asp.
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