It is arguably the dawn of the smartphone that will ultimately drive the adoption of augmented reality to ubiquitous levels. The seemingly ever-increasing computing power of the current and future generations of mobile phones may be to AR accessibility what bandwidth was to Internet accessibility. The use of smartphones for augmented reality offers a whole new dimension of opportunities, holding a major advantage over the previous two delivery methods discussed here: portability. Consider the types of hardware that are now almost expected features on a phone: the accelerometer (which measures how the device is being held by the user relative to the earth; i.e. it can tell if it is being held to the left, to the right, tilted up or down, and so forth); GPS (no longer measured relative to the user’s nearest cell tower, but with pinpoint accuracy down to the user’s exact coordinates); the digital compass, important in determining the orientation of the phone; and, vitally, the camera. These features combined create a device so well suited to the composition of augmented reality applications that developers must feel like children in a playground.
Existing research would appear to support the hyperbole surrounding mobile AR (as with any new technology, discourse that extends into hype causes many to raise the inevitable ‘is it just a gimmick?’ question). Jupiter Research published findings in 2011 regarding the development of mobile augmented reality, with a number of highlights including:
- AR capable smartphones had increased from 8 million in 2009 to more than 100 million in 2010
- By 2015, nearly 1.4bn mobile AR apps will be downloaded annually. This compares to just over 11m downloads in 2010.
- Annual revenues generated by mobile AR applications and services are expected to approach US$1.5bn by 2015, up from less than US$2m in 2010.
iOS | Android |
From observing various applications, I see very little exclusivity in terms of applications specifically made for a particular OS - thus there is much overlap of apps, particularly between those available for iOS and those available for Android handsets, as evident in the table above.
In the examples listed in the table (all of which can be found on the App Store and Market respectively), Pocket Universe is the rough equivalent of Google Sky Maps, which displays information about constellations and planets as you look at them, in real time, through the phone’s camera viewfinder. One feature I like about Universe that doesn’t exist for Sky Maps is that the user can toggle between a map view and a ‘live’ view (akin to toggling between map and satellite views on Google Maps); however, Sky Map’s big advantage over its iOS counterpart is that it’s free. Both applications share features such as night-vision mode (where your retinas are saved from burning when you’re looking from bright screen to night sky repeatedly) and a search mode for constellations and planets, where the digital compass will point you in the right direction until you see what you are looking for.
Google Goggles is another creation from the Google labs, available for both iOS and Android. If you’re an Android user it is a stand-alone application available on the Market, whereas it is integrated into the Google Search application for iOS. The application essentially turns the user’s phone into a unique form of search engine; where it scans objects, recognises them, and directs the user to a Google search of the object itself once it is identified. It recognises books, Blu-ray covers, corporate logos, among a plethora of others. Impressively, when I decided to test it against landmarks, it recognised a photo taken in Athens of the Temple of Olympian Zeus which contained no caption or other text-based data. The feather in the applicaton’s cap, however, is its almost absurd ability to solve Sudoku puzzles:
Of the applications listed in the table, I feel the greatest potential lies with Layar. Named after the Dutch company (founded in 2009) which created it, Layar is the original augmented reality browser. It is to augmented reality what Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer et al. are to the Internet. Describing the concept behind the application almost pushes it into the realm of the fantastical; look at the world around you through your mobile phone, and your surroundings will appear to you covered in layers of superimposed, digital information. It brings us one step closer to seeing the world as the T-800 did in Terminator 2, as referenced in the first part of this article.
The interface of Layar is quite user friendly. Users have a choice of different layers of information (some free, some which are paid for) through which they see their world around them. For example, there exists a Wikipedia layer which displays Wikipedia articles over buildings and other objects. For Irish users, there is a Daft.ie layer (Daft is the country’s biggest property website) which turns the concept of house hunting literal; peruse a neighbourhood of your choice and start pointing your phone at houses and, if a building has a listing on Daft, you will find out how much it can be gotten for. For US users interested in history, there is a layer called Battle of Franklin Sites which highlights areas (points of interest, or POI) which were pertinent to the Battle of Franklin in 1864. For further information, check out this quite excellent video produced by Layar which demonstrates the application’s potential:
The exception to my point about commonality between iOS and Android applications is the availability of Aurasma. Currently, the full application is available for iOS but is still being beta tested for Android, meaning there is only a ‘lite’ version available for handsets. The application, as described by its developers, is:
‘...a radical piece of technology that represents the future of how we use our mobile devices by bringing the physical and virtual worlds together for the first time...Using the smartphone's camera, GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi internet and its position, acceleration and direction, the technology combines image recognition and a conceptual understanding of the 3D world to recognize objects and images and seamlessly merge augmented reality actions into the scene. Without the need for barcodes or tags, the app is able to see its surrounding environment and make it fully interactive.’
There have already been some impressive uses of Aurasma in a number of high-profile projects. The application is integrated into the marketing campaign of upcoming J.J. Abrams film Super 8 by allowing Aurasma users to point their iPhone at the movie poster which generates an animation of the film’s trailer (see the full report from PC World, and a video demonstration below).
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