Imagine yourself in the middle of a strange city. Fantastic buildings, beautiful restaurants and historic monuments surround you, but everything is unfamiliar. There is so much to see and do, but right now, all you can hear is your growling stomach.
You could open your travel guide, try to locate yourself, and get outdated information about food options. Or you could use the Yelp app’s Monocle feature. You point your phone around you and miraculously, it knows exactly where you are and displays what restaurants are around, the type of food, a rating, the distance, and whether they are open for business!
Take a look below:
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Augmented Reality (AR) - the world around us enriched through the wizardry of technology.
Let's define AR a bit more thoroughly. What specifically is AR? It is not a simple question, as AR is a very broad subject embodying hundreds of different concepts, interpretations and implementations. The common definition of AR is the embedding an additional layer of information on top of "reality" (the normal perception of a person’s surroundings) in order to provide additional value. The usual medium is an interactive device such as a smartphone, which layers the information on top of a live-view camera. The display can encompass additional facts, an alternative view which enhances specific, more important parts of the scene, or a view which can even reveal things hidden to the naked eye.
AR has a huge range of possible applications – tourism and entertainment, medicine and military to name just a few. But the most important question remains. Will this work? Will AR become a reality, in a feasible and helpful manner? Will AR's benefits overcome the immense challenges of widespread adoption?
In blog posts to come, we will dive further into the fascinating world of AR. What are the technologies driving its growth? What has already been done, and what is coming soon (Google Glass, anyone?). Who will be using it? What is the long term potential? And what are the technological, economic, and societal hurdles AR faces?
All of this and much more … in the upcoming posts.
See you all again soon!
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