Latitude

This post is guest-authored by Jack Graham as part of a series on augmented reality.

Part 1 – The Stuff Augmented Realities are Made of
Part 3 – The Promise of Augmented Reality: What to Expect

While not the only devices currently in use, smart phones are ideal platforms for augmented reality applications because they pack all of the needed capabilities. AR applications have also been created for handheld game consoles, PDAs, and computers.

A Few Notable AR Apps, & How They Work

Augmented reality applications are appearing rapidly. Directory apps like Superpages and Layar use GPS to find where the user is and the accelerometer to tell which way they’re facing. They then position markers over the scene based on user-entered search terms.

Enter “restaurant” into Superpages and point it down a busy commercial street, and your camera will show you the street with graphical tags positioned over every restaurant in your field of view. Thumbing a restaurant’s tag will bring up search results on it. If you’re too far away for the app to show any results on camera, you can switch to an overhead map view to look at a wider area.

SpecTrek for Android and Ghost Hunter for the Nintendo DSi are games that challenge the player to hunt down invisible ghosts. In SpecTrek, the ghosts show up as bogies on a radar-like display generated from GPS coordinates and a street map of the player’s location. When the player closes in on a ghost, he can switch to camera mode. The ghosts appear as graphics superimposed on the player’s real surroundings, growing larger or smaller with distance. The player points his AR crosshairs at his quarry’s virtual GPS coordinates to capture it. If the player gets too close, the ghost will notice him and run for it, darting and weaving in the player’s display as it does so.

Columbia University’s ARMAR, or Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair, uses AR goggles to help army personnel perform repairs on equipment. ARMAR flags parts in a device with AR tags, guiding the user through the steps in a repair job. ARMAR links to damage control systems, showing the user where on the equipment repairs must be made. The prototype uses an Android phone as the handheld portion of the interface.

Not all AR apps make deep use of locative technologies. Some are simply toys, but no less clever for it. For the 2006 World Cup, Siemens developed Kick Real, a game that lets you kick an AR soccer ball with your real foot on the phone’s screen.

Pop-AR

Some readers might wonder why I’ve not so far mentioned the Esquire Augmented Reality Issue or the toy line for Avatar, both of which were well publicized applications of AR.

The Avatar toys let the user hold a card with fiduciary markers in front of their web cam. The software then draws a three-D graphic over the space delineated by the markers and moves it around as the markers move. On screen, it looks like the user’s fingers are disappearing into a solid object — a helicopter or an alien Na’vi.

Esquire’s AR issue does a similar trick with the pages of the magazine. While slickly executed, both efforts use AR in its most limited form, in that they require a computer and a webcam. This combination of devices breaks the immediacy of viewing through a palm-sized mobile and pretty much shackles the user to a desktop while using the app. The experience is more like at-home greenscreening than true AR.

To conclude, tomorrow’s post will discuss likely future developments in AR.

Jack Graham is Senior Interactive Producer at Vantage Travel in Boston. In his spare time he writes sci-fi, designs games, and habitually calls his Android phone a “jeejah.” His blog, which is about interactive marketing, social media, and emerging technologies, can be found by turning on your phone’s GPS and looking through the camera at: jackgraham.net/exmachina/

Header images courtesy of orse’s flickr & idrewuk’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.