You might not know it, but the past year has been huge for Augmented Reality. From the perspective of both consumer awareness and technological development, AR has been helped enormously by the fame of Google Glass, the expansion of the Oculus Rift community, and advances in Computer Vision and indoor beacon technologies. AR tools introduced in 2014 will enable developers to break AR out of it’s tethers and improving mobile hardware capabilities will let users across all industries start to use practical AR applications in everyday life.
AR almost surely will not become mainstream in 2015, but there is good reason to think that by 2016 AR will be used across industries by commercial and consumer early adopters.
Consumer Awareness
No matter what you think of Google Glass, its impact on the AR world over the past year has been absolutely fundamental in demonstrating the possibilities of AR and human computer interfacing. Before glass when trying to describe AR to people, one would have to rely on metaphors like “project images onto the world through video” or “like VR but with the real world as an environment.” Now when trying to explain AR saying “its like what Google Glass does” allows people (assuming they have seen/heard of it) to immediately get the idea. The future of Glass itself is murky, but the mindshare it created has been immense.
Oculus Rift was the second major player in 2014 to really help consumers understand the idea of a virtual environment. On its own and outside of a few hacks, Oculus and AR are disjoint sets. However because Oculus is making the promise of VR actually come true with high definition, people conceptually understand being in an immersive virtual environment much more easily. Now that Oculus is fairly well known, it is a much more accessible jumping off point to introduce what AR is and its similarities and differences from VR. Google Cardboard and Samsung’s Milk VR are great examples of offshoot technologies that have the ability to really improve the understanding of AR for the average user — if simply because of accessibility.
Underlying technologies
A major problem for AR adoption has been the tether of static “markers.” The user experience (generate QR/marker, print it out, view with phone) is the opposite of friendly and feels like a technological step backward. This is still not a solved problem, because AR geo-location still needs high quality initial reference points, but the implementation of Computer-Vision based pointcloud generation allows for high quality freedom of movement and virtual object placement that was thought to be basically impossible on mobile devices only a few years ago.
Indoor geo-location, laser mapping and pointcloud services have expanded significantly in 2014. The Apple iBeacon, while not high resolution, gives the capability for some indoor geo-reference and tagging that offers a massive range of AR applications. As more of the Internet Of Things capabilities come on-line, the ability to utilize those technologies in an AR setting expands alongside.
Improvement in generic mobile hardware capabilities makes these CV and sensor fusion technologies practical to implement. iPad and Android tablets can generally handle the majority of AR applications that are utilizing very complex CV and sensor data, while phones are starting to be able to handle more complex data with each generation. Where hardware really will make the difference in the coming year is in quality when rendering large, polygon and texture heavy 3D models with a high frame rates.
It finally applies
Taken together, it is clear that the infrastructure necessary to start building practical, value added and compelling AR applications and putting them into the hands of consumers has really come together over 2014. The first markets that are expected to see powerful AR applications are ones where there is already a strong interaction between physical and virtual data such as CAD/CAM, Navigation, Training and Tourism. Gaming has always been a leader in VR but the user experience of AR will probably see the most success in practical and commercial applications over gaming and entertainment for the foreseeable future.
We are looking forward to 2015 and contributing to the maturation of human-computer interactions to bridge the physical and virtual world. The hope is that better computer interfaces through AR, will make lives easier, safer, more vibrant, and in the end help us all make better decisions more intuitively.
