Augmented Reality

One of the hottest topics today is mobility. While mobility is helping organizations improve productivity, another application of mobile technologies is also gaining ground — both in professional and personal lives. This technology termed as Augmented Reality or AR is literally gaining lot of traction and 'eye balls'. We all have heard of Virtual Reality (VR) but AR is very different from VR. While VR creates immersive, computer-generated environments which are all virtual, AR is about enhancing real world; aims at enhancing real world by adding graphics, sounds, back ground information to the same.

Imagine you are getting into a conference or are at a social gathering and you look at a person and somewhere you have a feeling you know the person but do not remember him or her. Another example -—you are visiting Taj Mahal and you want to know details about the carvings done on a particular pillar. AR could help you in both. You could put on AR glasses (or may be just point camera of your smartphone towards the person or the pillar and information about the same will appear in your field of view. This is not fantasy, today similar applications do exist — they may not give information about people today but do give about places.

In AR, 3 key activities are involved:

Recognizing : Recognizing the object about which infor is being sought

Tracking : Track the coordinates of object and collate information about the object

Rendering : Rendering information back by putting things in context.And to do this, technologies involved include:

Tool for Recognizing and Rendering : Say a Smart Phone (with Camera) — which most of the times also act as a display system.

Tool for Tracking : Say Internet and GPS connectivity

AR Software : Software aims at getting information about the real object from various sources, put into context and then render back

It is believed Tom Caudell and David Mizell coined the phrase 'Augmented Reality' in 1992 while at Boeing helping workers assemble cables into aircraft. Proliferation of smart phones and ever increasing Internet penetration is ensuring great strides in the field of AR. This is being used or piloted in several areas including sports (to enhance viewer experience and give them more information than can be seen by naked eye), marketing (advertisements to promote products via interactive AR apps, enhancing information while you look at collaterals like leaflets, posters, banners, etc), education (where students get enhanced information about the subject they are being taught. It can provide explorative mode of education in medical sciences (where doctors could get real time information say during surgery), aviation and automotives (where pilots or drivers could get real time information that help them navigate better and in many cases displays are generally integrated into the windshield), tourism, greeting cards, toys, etc.

AR has its potential downsides also in terms of privacy, physical danger because of distraction, etc.