Comments for Augmented Reality Coming to Video Conferencing

Augmented Reality Coming to Video Conferencing

2010-02-04T21:01:20Z

"The hologram of a DNA spiral that I'm holding in my hand," your professor might say, "can be turned, twisted or expanded at-will and everyone on this video call will be able to see me do it." Is that the distant future of education, sales and casual communication online? Not if Augmented Reality company Zugara has its way.

The company announced today that it is working on fast and easy shared webcam Augmented Reality and its first prototype is already available.

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Though hundreds or thousands of Augmented Reality products hit the market last year and a handful have been widely seen - many people still doubt the utility of this technology. Zugara's approach seems to be one of the most clearly useful. If the company can pull-off making this kind of service fast, cheap and easy - we might find it in use in many different sectors. The webcam social shopper technology you see in the video is available now as a B2B service for apparel and shopping company partners.

Some AR proponents believe that in addition to the web browser and the mobile browser, the ability to view and interact with information placed on top of the world around us represents an important way that the internet will be interacted with in the future.

It's exciting to look forward to a web that lives between our eyes and the physical world. The AR industry faces challenges but it's one we're watching closely.

Do you work in the AR industry? If so, please take our survey about the way the industry really works. Watch this space for our next premium research report, on the use of AR in marketing.

Comment from Air Jordan Fusion on 2010-09-29

2010-09-30T01:35:27Z

Glad to have Blake and Matt of Zugara presenting at the world's first commercial augmented reality conference, April 21st (http://arconf.com)

Regards

Comment from Lee Dryburgh on 2010-02-15

2010-02-15T20:53:53Z

Glad to have Blake and Matt of Zugara presenting at the world's first commercial augmented reality conference, April 21st (http://arconf.com)

Regards

Lee

Comment from Jack Benoff on 2010-02-05

2010-02-05T18:05:09Z

Her Gerardo –

Thanks for your note. Perhaps we should be more clear (sorry, we were trying to keep the video short and concise). When we say “no proprietary plug-ins” we are referring to the fact that people don’t need to download any proprietary plug-ins specific to this technology. That is, there’s no “ZugStar” plug-in or the like. Many web based AR technologies do require a proprietary plug-in/download (as defined above) for the consumer, so this point is a sizable differentiator for us.

You’re right though, people need Flash (as we clearly pointed out), but the penetration rates on Flash are such that virtually nobody “needs the plug-in” anymore, they already have it:

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html

I hope that makes sense and is sufficient. If you’d like to pick up the conversation though, my twitter handle is below.

Best,

Jack
Zugara
http://twitter.com/jack_benoff

Comment from cheap dsi r4 on 2010-02-05

2010-02-05T09:24:36Z

Hi,
The success of augmented reality as a technology now still depends on factors that are largely out of the hands of its biggest proponents. For AR on mobile devices, the most pressing issue is increased adoption of smartphones with hardware robust enough to handle processor-intensive AR apps

Comment from Gerardo Curiel on 2010-02-04

2010-02-05T01:10:01Z

So, the video says "No propietary plugins!!1!", and then says "flash based". What a incongruence...

Comment from Shervin on 2010-02-04

2010-02-04T21:55:13Z

I can definitely see this becoming a useful tool in the not to distant future. Although, I still wonder if most will opt for a traditional web cam experience vs. an augmented reality one when it comes to a conference meeting. Seems a bit distracting, but I guess video conferencing had the same stigma when it was first released to those that were very comfortable with conference calls.

Comment from Blake Callens on 2010-02-04

2010-02-04T21:32:36Z

Arik,

That's a very good point. We're planning on implementing an API with this technology that would allow users to share whatever 3D models they want, so all the components of an machine could be stored under the user's account. ZugSTAR already has the ability to send 3D models that can be loaded and manipulated on the other end, without the viewer needing to set anything up, so models would only have to be set up by one user.

Blake Callens
Senior Software Engineer, Zugara

Comment from Arik Beremzon on 2010-02-04

2010-02-04T21:18:09Z

The technology definitely seems interesting and promising. What I don't really understand at this point is how it is going to provide for the variety of possible uses. Let's say engineers decide to use this app and they want to have a CAD drawing online while they conference. In that case the application would need to have CAD drawings of every single possible component, which is impossible.

So in order to get it to look as good as the demo makes it, you would need some kind of API to either insert custom on screen material or have some other way of rendering objects.