Web Reviews

How 'Real' is Augmented Reality?

Indianapolis, IN - November 2, 2009

“The web, and the ability to access information on our smart phones nearly any time and any place, has already had a dramatic impact on the distribution of information. Augmented reality is the next logical step in that progression.”

– Jim Cota

There’s a new wave rolling across the sea of technology that shows a lot of promise to alter the way we interact with the world around us. It’s called augmented reality, and it’s showing up in some interesting places. Augmented reality, if I took a stab at defining it, might sound a little science fiction-esque: Essentially, it’s the melding of our the physical world with an overlay of digital information. Let’s try a couple of examples to help clarify.

Bionic Eye is an iPhone 3GS application that overlays floating representations of New York City (and Washington, DC, and Chicago) subway stations onto the live video coming through the camera. So imagine you’re traveling in New York, standing on the corner of Broadway & 62nd and wondering how to find the nearest subway station. Simply open the application and point your phone down the street. The application uses the built in compass and GPS to determine your location and which way you’re facing to display signs on the screen pointing to the nearest station. Aim the phone straight down at the ground and you can see where the actual lines are running, color coded to match their routes. The application will also show other points of interest, hotels, and some restaurants.

Another example: Yelp! is on online tool dedicated to providing ratings and reviews for businesses of all types, written by patrons. Logically, Yelp! has an iPhone application as well, allowing you to find the ratings and reviews of restaurants near your current location. They have recently updated the application to include a mode called Monocle, which accesses the phone’s video camera and superimposes small signs over the video showing all of the restaurants around you, including their star rating and reviews. Simply stand on the corner of an unfamiliar town, spin in a circle, and know which of the places to eat is most highly rated in a matter of seconds.

One more: Trulia is a homebuyer tool that lists properties for sale, competitive pricing analysis, neighborhood maps, etc., all in one place. They have released an application for the new Android smartphone that allows you to point your phone down the street of a given neighborhood (or from a nearby rooftop) to instantly see all the listings overlaid on the video screen. You can also access the detailed listings and connect directly with the realtors.

But augmented reality isn’t limited to your phone. There are companies that specialize in bringing this type of interaction to products, movies, and more. Total Immersion is generally considered the industry leader at this point, and their projects have included making action figures to be co-marketed with the movie “Avatar” and 3-D baseball cards created for Topps.

The cards are interesting to serve more as a proof of concept than a marketing homerun: After you open the pack, you log onto their website, and hold the card up to your webcam. The system recognizes the card and superimposes a three-dimensional baseball player on top of the card. (It looks like he’s standing on the card itself.) Put the card on top of your desk and you can use the keyboard to control the 3-D avatar to ‘play’ their respective position. Pitchers pitch, hitters hit, outfielders catch fly balls.

In the most recent edition of Wired magazine, the letter from publisher Howard Mittman spoke briefly about a change that was taking place within the magazine. The ads, said Mittman, would be adopting a bit of augmented reality. By downloading an iPhone application called kooaba, you could use the phone’s camera to snap a picture advertisements in the magazine. The kooaba servers would then read the image and respond with more detail than was available in the print format. Mittman said, “You’ll discover some great stuff from our advertising partners throughout the issue, including access to premium content, Web extras, special deals, and giveaways.”

Lest you think this is all just an advertising gimmick (well, admittedly, at this point, most of these applications are some form of marketing), consider Babak Parviz, a bio-nanotechnologist at the University of Washington. Parviz has been working on augmented-reality contact lenses that would layer computer graphics on everything around us. “We have a vast amount of data on the web, but we see it on a flat screen,” says Michael Zöllner, an augmented-reality researcher at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research. “It’s only a small step to see all of it superimposed on our lives.”

I’m not sure any of us are ready for that, and I’m not certain that most of us are ready for augmented reality to seep into most corners of our lives, but there are certainly applications– like a few of the examples above– where it makes a great deal of sense. The web, and the ability to access information on our smart phones nearly any time and any place, has already had a dramatic impact on the distribution of information. Augmented reality is the next logical step in that progression.