Aurasma may have found market for augmented reality
on September 15th, 2011 at 8:33 amWe’ve been seeing whizzy augmented-reality demos and apps for years. But so far, AR has been a gimmick–a fun toy for your smartphone ortablet, but not something you go back to a lot.
At the Demo conference today, yet another company, Aurasma, showed off AR technology. While the demo I saw looked way too much like a product from Total Immersion that I saw at Demo in 2007, Aurasma might actually have (finally) found a non-trivial use for this technology.
With this company’s innovation, any real-world object can act as an AR trigger. Point your phone at a newspaper and an updated photo or video will display over the old printed one. Or point it at a building and you can see an interior map overlaid on it (shades of “Snow Crash”). Or–and this is where the business is–picture a manual for a physical product that shows you how to use the item you’re holding in your hand.
For example, if you wonder what to plug where on a router, hold the thing in front of your phone or tablet and run an Aurasma-enabled app. It will show you which cables go where and so forth.
I’m not saying this is a necessary development in product manuals, just that it’s not a bad business. Better applications are probably commercial–virtual call-outs or databases of maintenance data overlaid on an airplane mechanic’s tablet, for example.
Aurasma’s advance over the Total Immersion technology follows Moore’s Law. sedation dentistry california . Smarter video processing means the software can trigger off of thousands of real-world items instead of looking only for a few black-and-white diagrams or QR codes, for example. The new system can also display and manipulate much more complex 3D overlays.
Finally, Aurasma’s new 3D-I technology can display fully interactive 3D virtual items on your device. The demo I got for this was a hockey game, and it was cute but hopeless as anything other than a demo. Better game designers might be able to make more of it. Witness the Kinect.
Aurasma was a “Demo god” winner at the conference as well as the singular Audience Choice award winner, a prize that came with $1 million of IDG advertising (IDG is a technology publisher that produces the Demo conference).