Augmented Reality, the reality disrupter
A personal take on the trends, future of AR
Reality is becoming more and more elusive in our lives. Unless you have been living under a rock, you would have heard of Augmented Reality (AR), the technology that drives Snapchat filters, Pokemon Go, IKEA furniture place app etc. which superimposes a computer-generated image on a user’s real world view. Belonging to the immersive computing family, it is the close sister of Virtual Reality (VR) where clunky headset and drooling wire takes you to a riveting digital environment. Poised to exorbitantly change retail, advertisement, education, healthcare and a lot of other industries, AR might be the next biggest disrupter that can seamlessly amplify human capabilities. At the moment, there are very enthusiastic forecasts that show figures as high $500 billion by 2024 for VR & AR industry’s market value.
Requiring a whole lot of sensors, processing power and display capabilities for a truly alluring AR experience, overlaid content are displayed using mobile, special AR devices (Head Up Displays), smart glasses, Virtual Retina Display, smart lenses etc.
The technology juggernauts of the planet seem to hawk for their share in this futuristic AR market space. “I’m excited about AR,” Apple CEO Tim Cook remarked. “My view is it’s the next big thing, and it will pervade our entire lives”. Apple engineers are rumored to be working on augmented-reality glasses gauged after their series of patents filed in the last 2 years, closely related to AR/VR, some of which are patents for video recording with multi-angle playback, complex mixed reality headset, machine learning correction of GPS estimates etc. Google’s beta AR search results and AR maps direction stint, Google glasses for industrial enterprise applications, Instagram’s story sharing through mobile-first AR formats, Microsoft’s hololens 2 mixed reality technology for business, Intel’s new smart glasses named Vaunt which tries to makes consumers who wear it look little less like a techno cyborg jerk etc. are some popular advents.
To court developers, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have all unveiled their own AR software tools that they each claim will make creating AR apps easier. Chrome 81 adds new API support for augmented reality on the web, building upon functionality Google has been slowly but steadily adding to Chrome over the past few months. ARKit and ARCore are the canonical augmented reality SDKs on iOS and Android. ARStudio of Facebook and built-in developer support in HoloLens2 for popular development platforms such as Unity, Unreal, and Vuforia also help developers create ready to go mixed reality experiences. Though they all differ in their APIs, they perform the same basic functions of combining data from a device’s sensors to build the 3D world, track movement, render digital objects and mediate interactions between digital and physical content.
It has not been an all green reality also where quite a few startups that have bet on AR are on a brink of collapse. Daqri, an early mobile AR company which entered the market with it’s app that turns coloring book pages into digital 3D objects, failed to convert it’s audacious project of a futuristic-looking hard hat with integrated AR glasses into a reality. Magic leap, another AR device startup got things started off well-enough, but momentum really doesn’t seem to be on their side as they are spending years trying to distinguish themselves from the corporate mission of Microsoft and their HoloLens headset.
A lot of Indian AR/VR startups are trying to untap the hidden market potential in various arenas ranging from virtual reality cinema theatres by Jadooz, designing and developing Augmented Reality headset to visualize and interact with the complex 3D models by Ghost Vision, AR branding by blink to building DIY kits to learn more about VR/AR by SP Robotics work. With new startups and innovations taking shape everyday to revolutionize the game, immersive computing space in India is continuously evolving.
Realization of AR is augmented with a lot of technical and social impediments. One major chicken and egg problem is that AR tools are still relatively new to mainstream developers because of which there aren’t many useful or popular applications which leads to less fuss. A device which is at it’s best with an always on, full frame, lightweight, comfortable and socially acceptable solution is still unavailable for the consumers. It’s very well having all the other bits and pieces in place but if there is no idea on how to present a usable, non-intrusive, intuitive interface to the consumer, then nobody is going to bother about AR at all. A big issue is that AR fundamentally relies on a level of spatial understanding that goes far beyond grasping geometry. For all the ground that has been traversed by computer vision researchers in the past year, issues like segmenting environments by objects and accurately identifying them are still in their earliest stages.
Despite the hindrances, we can still be optimistic about the industry because of the perfect timing of it’s uptake along with an array of other technologies like 5G (fifth generation wireless technology for digital cellular networks), Artificial Intelligence (algorithms for cognitive capabilities) etc. with which it can synergically provide magical experiences. Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go strongly believes that 5G’s killer application is going to be AR. It also helps in location of users up to centimeter precision and heavy workload offloading. While early consumer AR campaigns have relied on computer vision to deliver digital enhancements to users and, whilst this is still at the core of Augmented Reality activity, integration with other sensory and processing technologies like deep learning for capturing correctly the nuances of interaction between virtual and real objects better and distributed computing can increase the relevance, engagement and usefulness of AR for a wide range of scenarios.
Would the mirror world, the dream & reality blurrer, stand it’s hype? It is more of a question of time than anything else (and we are close by!), and it is very certain that AR technology will find its footing and establish itself.
