AUGMENT YOUR REALITY

Enter the fourth dimension

Sanjeev Ghosh

magine walking down the street with little bubbles of information floating in your field of view giving you information about the world around you. This is not something of an Isaac Asimov noel mind that in the future al this is going to be as routine as brushing your teeth.

Brace Yourself Augmented Reality (a.k.a. AR) in laymens term is the addition (augmentation) of digital information over what we see in the real world. Imagine standing in front of your computers webcam and being able to see on the monitor how certain clothes would look on you, or may be how a new hairstyle would go on you face without even having to move from your spot! Dont go running off to your computer yet, like all other technology it has its requirements. Now with more and more people meeting those requirements AR is slowly evolving from something of a novelty into something that people really want to know about.

Facing Reality AR is about digital lifestyle, its about meeting people and finding out exactly what you want when you want it in the format you desire. Its going to be personal and natural. While it still has some maturing to do,

Corporations are pouring money into research and it will probably arrive earlier than expected. Unfortunately it would be hard for you to understand the power of AR if you have never seen what it is capable of. Which is why you will find the inclusion of many videos (shorten for you of course!) to aid you in your understanding of the application of the game changer. The aviation and automobile industries use AR for guided repairs and assembly quality checks among many other things. Advertising companies are using it as a marketing tool and artists have already started making their masterpieces in the virtual world that have no limits unlike the traditional canvas. Even real estate

agencies are giving out information about vacancies and their exact location on the building in a land far far away.

These examples are merely the tip of the iceberg that is AR and its applications are limitless provided you are willing to open your eyes (literally). All you need is a smartphone/tablet that has an internet connection, a GPS, a compass and the software installed. Wearable glasses are also going to be available soon, and if companies like Vuzix have their way, at least we wont end up looking like cyborgs. Alas, unless we see Steve Jobs unveil such an innovation, it is going to continue to be a hammer in search of nails. The software is present on almost all modern smartphones today and examples of such application are the Layer browser and the Junio browser which can be found in both iPhone and Android. The Ovi store from Nokia also has many AR applications if you wish to get your hands dirty. The problem for us in the real world today is the content. There is just not enough content in the AR world today to give users that nudge they need to whip out their mobile phone and look around. Content creation is primarily a user oriented task and you can find a very nice example of user created content in the Tweeps Around app that runs in Layer browser.
1957-62: Morton Heilig, a cinematographer, creates and patents a simulator called Sensorama with visuals, sound, vibration, and smell. 1992: Tom Caudell coins the phrase Augmented Reality while at Boeing helping workers assemble cables into aircraft.

Augmented Reality in Video Games and the Military Video game companies are quickly hopping aboard the augmented-reality locomotive. A company called Total Immersion makes software that applies augmented reality to baseball cards. Simply go online, download the Total Immersion software and then hold up your baseball card to a webcam. The software recognizes the card (and the player on it) and then displays related video on your computer screen. Move the card in your hands -- make sure to keep it in view of the camera -- and the 3-D figure on your screen will perform actions, such as throwing a ball at a target. Total Immersion's efforts are just the beginning. In the next couple of years, we'll see games that take augmented reality out into the streets. Consider a scavengerhunt game that uses virtual objects. You could use your phone to "place" tokens around town, and participants would then use their phones (or augmented-reality enabled goggles) to find these invisible objects. Demos of many games of this order already exist. There's a "human Pac-Man" game that allows users to chase after each other in real life while wearing goggles that make them look like characters in Pac-Man. Arcane Technologies, a Canadian company, has sold augmentedreality devices to the U.S. military. The company produces a headmounted display -- the sort of device that was supposed to bring us virtual reality -- that superimposes information on your world. Consider a squad of soldiers in Afghanistan, performing reconnaissance on an opposition hideout. An AR-enabled head-mounted display could overlay blueprints or a view from a satellite or overheard drone directly onto the soldiers' field of vision. Now that we've established some of the many current and burgeoning uses of augmented reality, let's take a look at the technology's limitations and what the future holds. The SixthSense Some of the most exciting augmented-reality work is taking place in research labs at universities around the world. In February 2009, at the TED conference, Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry presented their augmented-reality system, which they developed as part of MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group. They call it SixthSense. By using his capped fingers, Pattie Maes says even fingers with different colors of nail polish would work. A user can perform actions on the projected information, which are then picked up by the camera and processed by the phone. If he wants to know more about that can of soup than is projected on it, he can use his fingers to interact with the projected image and learn about, say, competing brands. SixthSense can also recognize complex gestures -- draw a circle on your wrist and SixthSense projects a watch with the current time.

Limitations AR is not at all rosy though. It has limitations where GPS accuracy comes into the picture. Until we see an accuracy of less than one

Chicken or the Egg?

Thats precisely the game played by the hardware and the content of the AR world today, and we cant decide which looks more ridiculous, wearing a HMD (Head Mounted Display) or walking around pointing your phone at everything! meter in our own hand held devices, we wont be able to truly leverage what it has to offer. But it is starting to show signs of improvement. Intel recently used AR at their annual Developers Conference to give users of AR browsers direction to various venues where the events were taking place, and it worked indoors! Now thats useful.

Look into the crystal ball Once using AR becomes second nature, things like interaction with button presses and 3D animations being used for presentations (.ppt 2020?) will become commonplace. Content will be pushed on to our field of view instead of only requesting for it and we cannot even begin to explain the new frontiers it will open for education and engineering. Imagine taking driving lessons from the windscreen in front of you, with a yellow paved road showing you the way. Its better than sitting in front of a computer because it is reality you are experiencing, but you have information at your disposal right in front of your eyes! There are possibilities of it becoming in your face as well should the early adopter not sure the blocking of unwanted content. All in all by the time we get to experience augmented reality integrated into the facets of our daily lives here in India, we will probably be reading an augmented reality version of Forbes in comfort of our rocking chairs, wondering about the time gone by and how far we have come.