We will use only one app for location-aware Augmented Reality
With location-aware Augmented Reality apps won’t have a purpose
Augmented reality will change our lives, we will only need a pair of glasses to work, communicate and interact with the world around us.
Right now those AR glasses like Microsoft’s HoloLens, Magic Leap and Project North Star are expensive or in development but you can experience Augmented Reality with many android and ios smartphones using ARKit and ARCore.
There are already many apps for those platforms, there are apps that let you see 3d models in the real world like the IKEA Place, single-player games like Stack AR, but also location-aware educational and entertainment apps like World Brush that lets you create paintings that anyone can see or games like Pokèmon Go.
Location-aware apps and games can be used to give contextual information, for example in a museum to give more information to the visitors and to make the tour more entertaining.
But many location-aware apps are similar, for example, different apps are created for different museums, even if the content of the apps is of the same kind.
If you go to a museum you will probably download only the app for the AR tour of that museum and you won’t see the information about the building or the restaurant that might be in front of the museum or the 3d painting at the entrance of the museum for which you need another app.
Another problem is that the number of platforms for AR content will increase the developers will need to develop their app for each platform resulting in a huge time loss and a lesser diffusion of AR.
Thus, I think that that location-aware apps and games will converge into one app, that in this article we will call “virtuality”, let’s see it features.
Modularity
Google has tried to integrate modularity into android with instant apps. When you open an instant app link, the part of the app that you need to open the link is downloaded but the whole app isn’t downloaded or installed.
The team of virtuality will create the UI, building and interaction blocks:
- The UI blocks are the blocks that form the UI, for example, they can be used to display a variable in a game.
- The building blocks are primitive objects with editable proprieties like a text block, an image block, a web view block or a 3d model block
- The interaction blocks are blocks that can affect proprieties of other blocks when some events happen, for example they can make a building block bigger if you touch or in a game where you needs to collect items when you go near one of them they can delete the item and add +1 to the UI block that displays the number of items you have collected
Using UI, building and interaction block the developers can create, outside or inside the app infinite and also complex combinations that are called layers.
I can’ t wait to see something like virtuality, so I am making an app myself, that becomes every day more like virtuality, one of the simple layers used in my app is a post layer, composed by a text and a plane block
Only the layers that the user selects will be downloaded as if they were part of an instant app.
Scalability
The app will download from the server and display only the content you need, for example only the AR content in a certain range from you.
In my app scalability is done using GeoFire, a “set of open-source libraries for JavaScript, Objective-C, and Java that allow you to store and query a set of keys based on their geographic location”, which in my case is the location of the user.
Multi-Platform
Imagine how much time would a developer needs to create an app for every platform that will support Augmented Reality, of which the number will increase.
Virtuality will expand to every compatible platform starting from the most used ones, right now those are ARKit, the platform that I used for my app and ARCore.
The developers of virtuality will make the UI, building and interaction blocks compatible to every platform so that the creators of the layers do not need to do anything.
Persistence
AR content in virtuality will be persistent, meaning that if you place an object somewhere it will remain there, this means that we need to create the AR Cloud, which industry veteran Matt Miesnieks defines as “a machine-readable 1:1 scale model of the real world; he is creating it at 6D.ai
There are many ways to achieve this, for example using GPS like World Brush, but with a precision of about 10–20 m outside, and the compass, accelerometer, and gyroscope that will give you the orientation of the content.
There are Visual Positioning systems that can locate you by looking at the features of the building near you like the one made by Sturfee and the one recently presented by Google
There is Placenote SDK that can create a map of the area where you are and can find your position using that map but it gets slower to find your position as the map gets larger.
There are also systems that use vertical and horizontal planes or computer vision to locate you.
The method used by virtuality will be a combination of the ones above, in my app, I am using Placenote and the GPS to create many maps and combining them together creating the AR Cloud
Notifications
Users need to know if there are Augmented Reality contents near them, otherwise, they won’t open the app.
In some platforms they will be notified, in others where the apps is always on there is no need for this feature, what they need is the indication to the “Augmented Places”, that in my app is the distance from the maps of Placenote
Real-Time Updates
The contents will be saved in a server and can be viewed by anyone in real-time meaning that if a user adds an object someplace another user in the same place can see it.
It is not difficult to have real-time updates in an AR app, you only need to update what is displayed on your device when some other user edits it, in my app, this is done using Firebase.
With Real-Time Updates you can create multiplayer games or experiences like this one created by Google with cloud anchors, a system that creates a temporary map of what your phone is seeing and shares it with the people near you
or this one created by the Placenote team.
Ranking and reward system
To promote good content and remove bad or offensive content a ranking and reward system will be used in virtuality.
There is a broad selection of systems that we could use but I prefer the following because it can help to reduce the number of content in cramped areas and also do the opposite.
In the system I choose every content has a countdown, let’s say one year after which is deleted, a user can like o dislike a content doubling or halving the countdown, so that the good content remain more time and the bad ones are deleted immediately.
Economy
If someone wants his content, for example, ads or the tour of a museum, not to be deleted as soon as they are placed, they can buy time in which their content is invulnerable from the countdown, half of the money they pay will go to some users, maybe the ones with most likes, the ones that have seen the ads or the ones that include ads in their content if it is seen by many people and the other half to the developer of virtuality and the layers.
Before the paid content is placed we need to check if it meets some quality standards and if there isn’t other paid content nearby, to not ruin the experience with virtuality.
The best way to create this kind of economy is using a blockchain with a cryptocurrency and smart contracts, using a cryptocurrency, for example, you can also pay the restaurant that you have seen and booked in virtuality.
Conclusion
I wrote this article because I think that something like virtuality will be awesome and is the best way to make Augmented Reality useful and mass adopted and I hope that it will be realized as soon as possible, let me know what you think.
I can’t wait to augment my reality, so I am trying to build virtuality.
If you want, we can build it together, just contact me at alexlaconca@gmail.com