One of the most exciting, gee-whiz features being developed for mobile phones right now are augmented reality browsers. Rather than fire up a mobile Web browser like Safari or Opera, these generally add an information layer over the world as seen through your phone’s camera lens. Last year at TechCrunch50, Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera wowed the crowd with its AR browser demo, Layar is creating a lot of buzz in Europe, and this summer AR technologies finally started to hit the market. You had Yelp sneak in an AR feature into its latest iPhone app, and a growing number of Android apps are embracing AR as well.
We are at the very early stages of what may very well become a common interface for mobile browsing, which means that it is still very primitive. You can only click on buildings or objects within your immediate view. Daniel Wagner, a virtual reality researcher at Graz University of Technology in Austria, is proposing two ways to make AR browsing better: panoramic and bird’s-eye zooming.
In the video above, he demonstrates these two types of zooming techniques which allow the user to zoom out to see what else is around him, much like he would with an online map, select something to click on—maybe the museum two blocks over—and then zoom back in. The panoramic zoom gives the user a sense of other clickable items within a 360 degree view, whereas the bird’s-eye view gives a top-down picture that looks like a close-up satellite shot with clickable locations.
Okay, so now we have panning and zooming. What someone needs to figure out next is an elegant way to hyperlink from one hotlinked location to another. That way you could teleport, at least virtually.
(Via Games AlFresco, via @loic).
I always say that all this AR apps will not make it until you have some good lesnes to look through.
I always say that all this AR apps will not make it until you can see them through lenses.
Amazing concept. I can’t help thinking that there’s something in the dating space that would work really well with augmented reality. Imagine scanning a room or a bar to see other users’ bio/profile/interests. Too creepy?
I want Grand Theft Auto: AR…that would be sick
Honestly, I used with Yelp and yeah it works but who cares? Google Maps on my iPhone is so much easier to use than Yelp’s augmented reality.
Put this technology into a pair of sunglasses and you’ve got yourself a deal.
What this video proves is that a 2D map is a much a better user-interface for location based information than a camera-view. Having to hold up a camera and make a 360 degree pirouette to see which points of interest are around you, is not exactly user friendly. And since we already have 2D maps in our phones, I predict the deadpool for augmented reality browsers.
True, if you know your GPS position do you need an augmented reality browser to obtain information?
Short term, perhaps the best application for cameras on mobile devices remains bar code reading and the best use of augmented reality will be head-up displays in cars.
Longer term, contact lenses with LEDs mounted on them could be the future.
That is, if tapping directly into the optic nerve doesn’t come first!
Nice User Experience
But how does it work.
is the university identified by the picture in the phone or the location of the phone as in detected by the cell phone tower.
how does such a location based service work?
The AR concept seems good in pointing out the landmarks and locations nearby. Very useful one. The video depicts two different zooming mechanisms which make AR functionality also to zoom more to view more location in a much clear way.