Augmented Reality

Augmented what? And why should i care? You should care because these applications are around and available for you right now and could change the way you view and interact with the world!  From a development perspective you could incorporate this into your next project.  Augment defined in  the dictionary means:

1.	to make larger; enlarge in size, number, strength, or extent; increase: His salary is augmented by a small inheritance.
2.	To make (something already developed or well under way) greater, as in size, extent, or quantity: Continuing rains augmented the floodwaters.

With this in mind the term augmented reality means to make reality larger or greater in size extent or quantity. And thats where the new breed of Information technology applications come into play. Applications that enhance your current reality usually  by overlaying images, text, or video onto what you are currently looking at! This is different from virtual reality, which removes you from your current reality and emerses you in an alternative reality.

If this is sounding too star trekky lets delve into some examples and a few of my favourite apps!

My favourite augmented reality Applications!
Layar
This is layar: its a new type of browser currently available on the android phone. The promise is that you can point the phone at a house and it will tell you how much it is, or a restaurant and it will give you the ratings for that restaurant, or a general poi and it will display the related information. They removed it from the apple itunes store because it was too buggy, something to do with poor memory management. I am looking forward to this application coming to the iphone.

WorkSnug
Is a similar application, point it in any direction and it shows you the nearest places to work, and whether or not these places have free wifi connection. Perfect for bloggers on the move!

Business Cards
Give out your business card with a predifined pattern on it. Go to the persons website, Point a webcam at the business card and…

Marketing campaigns
Not so useful, for everyday life but fun all the same, marketing departments have been successfully using this technology for their campaigns. Take a look at this transformers augmented reality application:

Have a look at this interactive product catalogue.

Industry Applications
Possibly the most useful future applications could be in industry. Aiding users to fix or maintain items.

Layar and WorkSnug, and the industry related apps are examples of Mobile Augmented Reality. While the Marketing examples are desktop augmented reality apps.

Whats the history?
1992
Tom Candell coined the phrase when he was an employee of boeing. He wanted engineers and people working on an airplane to look at a model and determine the specifics, ie the repair and release notes for example.

1992-1998
LR rosenberg develops virtual fixtures. Steven Feiner, Blair Mcintyre and Doree Silgman present first major paper on AR systems.

1999-2006
hirokazu Kato develops the AR toolkit at the hitlab. The tool kit is still available and you can use start using it here. In 2000 Bruce Thomas develops the AR Quake an outdoor augmented reality game.

2007 – Present
During 2007 Sony releases the sony eye for the playstation. In 2009 the AR toolkit is made available to flash developers. 2009 has seen a small explosion of augmented reality apps.

The future
Many things are in the pipeline with more powerful phones being developed, and the technology being made available to developers via toolkits this could be the next big thing.

In the next post i will be going through some useful free on-line tutorials and exploring ways in which you can begin making your own augmented reality apps. I will also be reviewing the most useful free tutorials and posting the top ten tutorials which I believe to be the most helpful.

Khosi