Before last week, if you’d asked me what “augmented reality” meant, I would have said it had something to do with hallucinogens. That changed for me Oct. 18 when I attended a program at Stanford University called "Terminator Vision: Augmented Reality UnPlugged.” It turns out Augmented Reality, or AR, is a way for a computer, smartphone or other device to train its camera on a scene -- a row of businesses on a street, for instance -- and superimpose information about that scene on the screen.
The image is, then, augmented with the extra info. In the live street scene example, the augmented data could be information about the businesses on the street -- a restaurant, a coffeehouse, a dress shop, and the like. Other augmented apps enable shopping, games, and other information to enhance the user experience at a particular place. In the image on the left, the AR app lets a user in a Barnes & Noble store insert an image of the fashion model Brooklyn Decker into the scene. Sometimes, AR apps are just for fun. This app was created by GoldRun, a company whose founder and CEO, Vivian Rosenthal, appeared at the Stanford forum.
The moderator, William "Whurley" Hurley, general manager of Chaotic Moon Labs, compared augmented reality to the image that is projected on the screen through which a fighter pilot looks to see where he’s flying. It shows the plane’s air speed, altitude and how level its wings are. Of course, now there's an AR game for that. The conference was titled “Terminator Vision,” I presume, as a reference to the “Terminator” movie franchise where the Arnold Schwarzenegger character sees information about the scene he’s in displayed before him, AR style.
The forum, attended by several hundred, featured emerging tech companies like GoldRun developing AR applications, the creator of a software platform for other AR developers, a maker of chips that power AR apps and a venture capital firm funding other startups.
Bruno Uzzan is CEO of Total Immersion, a Los Angeles-based company that sells a widely used commercial augmented reality platform called D’Fusion Suite. He demonstrated an AR app created on D’Fusion that lets a customer try on sunglasses via desktop computer. Uzzan looked into the Web cam of a computer and the monitor showed his face filling an oval frame on the screen as he moved closer in. Then he clicked on an icon representing a particular style of sunglasses and the image of that style was superimposed on the image of his face. Click on another style and he could see how that one looked on him.
Uzzan cited industry forecasts that the AR application market is booming. It is expected to skyrocket to $1.5 billion by 2015, from just $2 million in 2010. I dug a little deeper and found that forecast comes from Juniper Research, which also forecasts nearly 1.4 billion annual downloads of AR apps by end users worldwide by 2015, up from just over 11 million in 2010.
Elsewhere at the event, someone from smartphone chip maker Qualcomm demonstrated how an AR app can be printed on a card and make a game show up on the device. The Qualcomm rep produced a card about the size of a ticket to an NBA game and then trained the smartphone’s camera on the card and a basketball game app came up on the device.
While intrigued by the technology, I was a little disheartened that most of the applications were commercial in nature, advertising products and convincing people to buy more stuff. Another app lets people try on clothes using AR by superimposing an image of an outfit on a photo of themself.
I’m hoping the market expands into more nobler pursuits such as information or education. Google has a feature called Google Goggles. Train your Android smartphone or tablet on a famous painting or statue and Google delivers information about it to the device. I’m hoping, for instance, for an AR app that a student can point at a flower and learn about what kind it is. Maybe with version 2.0.
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