Augmented Reality… What Is It?
Posted: Tuesday 04 October, 2011
Colin Miller
The chances are that you’ve probably heard of the term “Augmented Reality” by now, if not, it’s essentially a live and direct view of a real world object or environment, which is layered with additional information through a form of computer-generated display (most commonly the screen of your smartphone) using GPS data, graphics and video - just think of the computer vision used by Terminator as a popular example.
Looking through your smartphone at the world around you may not be the most practical way to go about your day-to-day activities, and at the moment on a consumer level, the technology, although incredibly advanced and impressive, is not yet ready to integrate seamlessly into our lives.
Augmented Reality has the potential to change the way we view the world around us and receive information about almost anything you could imagine. It has the potential to bring all of the information stored in our devices and on the Internet into the real world environment, albeit digitally.
There have been some extremely interesting and innovative uses of Augmented Reality in the world of advertising. Volkswagen employed one of the most notable examples in its “Scirocco Cup AR” campaign. Readers of popular car magazines were encouraged to remove a steering wheel-shaped insert from the magazine and asked to log onto the corresponding website which fired up their webcam. The webcam then recognised a code on the steering wheel insert, which began the augmented reality experience and allowed users to control a racing game online by using nothing more than a paper steering wheel cutout and their webcam.
The future of AR is surely a bright one; a technology that can integrate so usefully into our lives to provide us with information that would otherwise have to be viewed on a screen is certainly part of the evolution of technology. Enabling users to operate as naturally as possible while still retaining all of the benefits and functionality of technology can create incredibly useful applications and potentially change the way humans and technology interact.
