Things Learned at ISMAR 2009
Programmer Joe ยป 50 Things I Learned at ISMAR 2009:
Layar isn’t going to ruin AR. I went into the week with a fear that the GPS+compass category (which Layar is currently leading) would forever taint the term Augmented Reality by providing a fairly useless AR view (when compared to a map or list view.) Instead I think that people will simply not use the AR view and that Layar pushes location based services forward in a huge way by providing access to multiple content providers from a single app. One day no one will remember that they started out as primarily an AR app.
I think there are valid applications of GPS+compass AR applications – driving directions and local business listings are not among them. Entertainment and storytelling show more promise so far, but we’ll see…
Some people think that “the Layar and Wikitude type apps” don’t count as real AR because they only use the camera for video pass through. Most people (including some of the people in the first group) agree that it doesn’t really matter whether these apps are AR or not.
I’ve experienced this bias myself and in my opinion it’s just silly. If you criticize Layar and Wikitude for just using the camera for video pass through, you’re basically saying that any and all kinds of AR must rely on some kind of computer vision voodoo, otherwise they don’t count; that seems terribly smug and narrow-minded to me. Layar and Wikitude present us with a view of the world around us and they augment this view with digital information connected to a specific point in space. Just because they’re inaccurate and do things differently doesn’t mean they aren’t AR apps. In my opinion this bias primarily stems from envy, because these apps are actually available to consumers and they are getting all the media attention these days.
For many researchers, augmented reality is a solution looking for a problem. There are a lot of gee-whiz demos and many people seem to accept cool factor as a compelling reason to use AR instead of more traditional solutions.
I’m under the same impression. I think this either means that AR will never break through, that it’ll take a long time to break through, or (most likely) that it’ll break through in ways no one in the field could possibly imagine. That researchers don’t take the marketing uses seriously also shows that they’re in no way concerned with exposing people to this technology on a broad basis. From a research point, AR still seems to be in the punchcard era.
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