I had a great day yesterday at OpenMic (Mobile Innovation Camp), a knowledge transfer event in Guildford themed around Location and Augmented Reality. And in the spirit of the event, I wanted to share the things I’d learned from the day.
The first speaker was Paul Golding from Wireless Wonders who gave us a great overview of the current state of play with AR, and the first thing that became clear is that AR is quite a broad term which currently encompasses three main approaches.
New services like Wikitude, Insqribe, Layar and Junaio use the user’s location and orientation obtained through GPS and device compass to overlay virtual objects over the camera feed, and are aimed at enabling people to quickly place objects in the virtual space.
Much more impressive though, are applications which react directly to the camera feed to recognise objects in the real world and provide new information or ways of viewing them. Within this approach there are two methods, using predefined markers to aid recognition or using digital fingerprinting to recognise the object directly. Some great examples were shown of Lego boxes, baseball cards and cereal packets. It is expected that markerless AR will gradually become the dominant approach.
Implications of this technology could be new advertising space, new places to send messages to your friends, and also the elasticity of distance. Nowadays we all know that the use of mobile phones means that times can be flexible, people don’t have to meet up at the pub at 8:00 sharp, we can communicate on the move and change plans. Perhaps AR will expand that to the actual meeting location. Let’s meet up in a general area and have a look at virtual layers to decide on where we shall go.
The big problem at the moment is that all the current services are pretty much doing the same thing, and they are walled gardens. We can’t pick up our virtual pet from one virtual world and take it with us to a completely different one. Standards need to be defined to move AR implementations on from a novel feature to a useful product.
Perhaps virtual worlds will be like websites, in that everyone can make their own layer for the same place, and we choose which one we want to view (this is the Layar approach). This brings in the implications of who owns objects in the real world, who can put a message on that cereal box and who can’t?
Other speakers included Andrew from Rummble, a new service which uses the notion of trust to provide users with personalised ratings of places. The idea is that if someone likes something that you like, then their ratings on other places will be of more interest to you than someone who doesn’t. This reminded me a lot of some outcomes of our Happy Packages research, in which (amongst lots of other things!) we explored what people wanted from ratings services (resulting in our innovative Face-the-Place iPhone prototype!)
There was also a good panel discussion about how the current market was viewed from the perspective of developers, and tackled issues such as fragmentation, user privacy and multi-tasking.
In the afternoon we broke out into barcamp sessions to discuss the opportunities from what we had heard and come up with some ideas. All in all it was a fascinating day and thanks to the organisers!
The Mobile Pie laboratory is currently exploring AR technologies of it’s own as we see it as a very significant research area that will have big impacts on the future methods of mobile use (and so in turn, how the web is used) – so look out for some very interesting results in the near future!
