Is Augmented Reality Garbage or Golden?
We've been writing a lot here about Augmented Reality (AR), technology that displays layers of data on top of our view of physical reality through mobile phone cameras, projected images and webcams. It seems like a red-hot field and something we should cover all the more. Some people think that's not the case though; they say it's just hype, a technology looking for applications or a recipe for disappointment.
Below we offer you a chance to let us know what you think. Please take our poll and let us know if you think these services being heralded as Augmented Reality are the real deal or something not worth reading about. Just below the poll we offer some links to a few of our most important articles about AR and some opposing viewpoints from readers. Let us know what you think!
Key posts from our past coverage include:
Augmented Reality: A Human Interface for Ambient Intelligence (A good introduction)
Augmented Reality: Five Barriers to a Web That's Everywhere
Prepare Yourself: Augmented Reality Hype is on the Rise
First iPhone Augmented Reality App Appears Live in App Store
Hyperlinking the Real World
Two Opposing Views
Readers have been debating the value of AR in comments on our past coverage. Here are two good ways of articulating opposing views on the subject:
Former HP Labs team member turned tech consultant Gene Becker is optimistic.
"In the same way that the web browser on a computer screen is a window into cyberspace, an augmented reality viewer is a window that looks out on the blended physical/digital landscape, the geoweb, the city as platform.We're just at the beginning of a fifty year adventure where we will infuse the physical world with connected digital experience. AR browsers like Layar and Wikitude are like Gopher was in 1991 -- early, geeky, not a lot of content, not a great experience...but watch what happens next."
An anonymous commenter left these critical thoughts:
"I must thank MK for the app list. It confirms to me there are no useful AR apps right now, and also that the feasible apps are very limited, because they all seem kind of similar to one another.It's just so much easier for me to use an ordinary browser map application and see all the locations of interest for any conceivable query than to mess around with a phone's camera.
AR seems kind of like voice recognition to me, in a way.
Recall that some years ago there was a massive hype storm about how much better voice input would be than typing. But despite the general availability of a fairly decent program (Dragon), most people still use keyboards because keyboards just have more utility and usability combined. That's how I feel about these crappy AR apps until there are some serious breakthroughs in both hardware and software.
I mean, you really need a lightweight high-res infinite-battery HMD with meter-accuracy location for it to make much sense to me -- snapping photos through a cellphone and looking at crappy low-res decorations on the result seems very weak to me, especially given the error scale of GPS. But no such HMD exists. Alternatively (as in Vinge's novel) you need something like a long-range RFID on every object or location of interest, and that isn't going to happen any time soon either.
Like voice recognition, there may be some special purpose AR apps in the short term that are useful and effective for narrow uses. I'm sure Dragon is great for many disabled people, and for the few people who are really skilled at dictation, so perhaps the same kind of niches can be found for low-tech AR.
But I don't think it will be broadly useful in the near-term, so it seems to me to be an unworthy thing to spend so much time and effort hyping right now."
What do you think? Let us know by voting in the poll above and in the comments below.
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I think augmented reality is alot like most new tech , its too early to tell where it might go . That being said I can think of about 20 apps that would be perfect if ported to augmented reality. google could make an augmented reality app "just point it at something and bam search. Yelp could have an app where you could leave a review on the outside of a restuarant stuff like that :)
It's both. The technology is important, but many current executions are hype/gimmicky.
www.twitter.com/jack_benoff
AR is "golden" for any *OPEN* plat form.
AR is "garbage" for all closed, anti-competition, platforms **cough**iPhone**cough**
http://www.morethantechnical.com/2009/08/26/iphoneos-3-1-will-not-allow-marker-based-ar/
i think Augmented Reality is going to be *huge*, but a lot of people I see making arguments for or against aren't using the definition I use when I think or talk about AR.
To me, augmented reality is the ability to overlay information, tied somehow to the physical world. It doesn't necessarily require a live video view with stuff overlaid on it.
Some apps that are out now (some for a long time) that I consider augmented reality:
There are lots of other examples, but I think people who define AR as "pointing a camera at something, and getting information inserted into your live view" are thinking a little too narrowly.
I can't fully explain why, but AR feels like it's going to the be the "big thing" in the coming months. It's going to cause unforeseen evolutions in how we connect with each other and interact with our world, in the same way that Twitter and Facebook have (if not to the same degree).
So, you can definitely count me in the camp that says AR is Golden, not Garbage. :-)
I consider augmented reality applications based just on gps and compass too poor for real world applications. I think location technologies should be enhanced with computer vision techniques in order for AR applications too really become useful.
I think you at ReadWriteWeb forgot to include your own post http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hyperlinking_the_real_world.php in your recent reviews of augmented reality applications.
Posted by: https://id.najdi.si/dusano
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August 26, 2009 11:15 AM
The low power HMD's exist now, for mostly military use. Companies like Liteye Systems has high-res HMD units that run on a set of AA batteries for 40+ hours Continuous. Now we need them to make a light weight version for use outside the battlefield. There 800x600 or 1280x1024 resolution for near to eye is more then high enough for this type of use. Liteye also offers a see-through optic which projects the signal over your view, real augmented reality.
the "google street view of things" built into your eyes.
It's cool, but it's almost useless in it's current form (and form factor). I personally got all excited about it, spend a few minutes with WikiTude and Layar, but then I realized that I won't be using it going forward. Well, I could use eyeglasses with AR or it could be cool in a car on the windshield, but it requires a precise GPS and enough screen size to be really beneficial.
Is Augmented Reality Garbage or Golden? (POLL and background links) http://bit.ly/19lCAX [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/3560220529]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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August 26, 2009 1:30 PM
As others have noted, the current implementations show the tech in embryo. There's a long way to go. But the technology itself speaks to some very fundamental adaptive trends. Computation and all it's affordances is getting smaller and more powerful and steadily moving closer and closer to us, both physically and cognitively. The simple need to quickly interrogate our environment for valuable feedback is not going to fade. Nor is the advantage conferred by seeing data shadows and obfuscated architectures within the natural and synthetic ecosystems we inhabit, nor the value of instant access to communications protocols, social profiles, and news streams. The AR dream presents all of these affordances in a small, portable, and, ultimately hand's-free interface that breaks open the cloud, drawing out the digital world and merging it with the analog.
nice but I can't figure out the utility
I think John Bancroft is right, AR should be extended to include apps like Waze (available for Android, too!) and even GMaps. And I can attest that Wikitude is genuinely useful: I've used it to navigate to an El station I needed to get to.
I think there is some over-hyping (e.g. Layar gets an awful lot of press for, from what I can tell, not doing anything useful or even interesting yet), but I also think there is some "there" there, and we're going to see some amazing things probably sooner than we expect. (Heck, people are amazed by Wikitude when I show it to them now.)
I'm POSITIVE augmented reality will be a trend in the near future as more people become comfortable with their smart phones and the technology improves.
It's a neat idea, if chock full of eye candy. When PDAs could play mp3's and had GPS, there were a few "sound seeing" tours that you could download, and play when you got there. And i could cope with that.
To me, mobile phones are mostly entertainment. And expensive at that. I don't want one. But since pay phones and emergency call phones have largely disappeared, getting a mobile phone makes sense from a safety point of view. One discouraging trend is that people think that they can meet in the middle of nowhere without a plan. They think the cell makes them invincible. But unless you have Iridium, cell coverage isn't everywhere yet. I frequently go to dark sky sites for astronomy. These places are often cell tower free as well.
I think the technology is important.
it's already here - with phone, mobile mail, remote publishing we use lots of ar features everyday without thinking.
and in my opinion, ar has already changed a lot:
the way we work
the availability of friends and family
productivity
...and it is beginning to give us superpowers; we are slowly becoming ubiquitous
For all this to work, we really need some standards for geotagging of content. It is in discussion already, I know. But if I want to pick up real time live information at or about a particular place, any content needs to be available, formatted, and demarcated for any developer to deliver through multiple systems, relevant to location. Information has a tag for the time it was created, its context is held within it's text, but it lacks an innate 'place' tagging standard. We have 'What', and 'When', now we need 'Where'. Then this stuff'll really kick off.
Actually, I don't think standards are all that important here.
The data needed to geocode a location are trivial and easily interchangeable. The only hard problem is going from a street address to a lat-long, and Google Maps among other services (with a convenient API!) has this problem essentially solved already for big chunks of the developed world.
So whether service X uses V&H encoded in ASN.1 or service Y uses Lat-Long in some silly verbose XML dialect, it hardly matters; translating between these two formats would be trivial, whether they are "open" and there is an ISO or WWW group that manages them at a high cost, or "closed" and made by some random engineer at a startup.
In the (to me) unlikely event any of these "AR" map-annotation startups gain traction (the underlying data is just the same as for Google Maps, after all), whichever one has market share plurality will emerge as a defacto standard that will be trivial for everyone else to follow. Or if they try to control or license their format, the defacto crown will go to the most commonly used format that isn't protected.
Either way, it's just not a big deal. Standards are much more important where there are new communication protocols or where data formats are complicated, but that's not the case for geocoding.
As an aside, if for whatever odd reason large numbers of people actually start using cellphone AR apps, Google will just step in and take over the market whenever they like on the strength of their existing vast compendium of map-based geocoded data including location descriptions, transit schedules, etc. etc. etc.
Standards are incredibly important.
How on earth would the web have taken off if people needed to download a new browser for every website they wanted to look at?
AR applications go far beyond just mapping.
--
As for Google...they have about a year window to go into the space beyond it leaps ahead of them too much.
Googles data isnt exclusive to them, after all. And other data (like 3d point-clouds of citys...making very precise positioning easier) could be very valuable to these apps....and that data hasn't even been collected yet.
Augmented reality requires accurate GPS and the phone makers aren't bothering about GPS accuracy. Five years ago, I was using a Pharos SD GPS that is still VERY substantially more accurate than any phone on the market today - and I'm testing everything I can get hold of. Until users start complaining, the phone makers won't care, so let's raise our voices!
Augmented reality has finally moved away from the realm of science fiction (think Terminator and Robocop) to unimaginable reality.
This is tied in, in no loose manner, to the evolution of wearable computing to mobile computing!
I feel that the focus should be on whether device guys like Apple support complete immersion of their device with the environment.
Once it does that, we can then work out crazy augmented reality applications for that!
So whether service X uses V&H encoded in ASN.1 or service Y uses Lat-Long in some silly verbose XML dialect, it hardly matters; translating between these two formats would be trivial, söve whether mantolama ve söve fiyatlarıthey are "open" and there is an ISO or WWW group that manages them at a high cost, or "closed" and made by some mantolama random engineer at a startup.
In the (to me) unlikely event any of these "AR" map-annotation startups gain,traction (the underlying data is just the same as for Google Maps, after all), whichever one has market share plurality will emerge as a defacto standard that will be trivial kartonpiyer for everyone else to follow. Or if they try to control or license their format, the defacto crown will go to the most commonly used format that isn't protected.
I know I'm late to this post, but this is a poor example of a critique of AR. This is a perfect example of a strawman fallacy. An anonymous commenter versus a person with credentials? The opposition has voices with equal weight and importance as well, and to provide an accurate and honest discussion of the counterpoints, it would be worthwhile to find someone who didn't just anonymously comment on a website somewhere.