Augmented Reality - It is a reality, indeed

For a long time, a set of new technologies, like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, have been introduced. We have knew about them from many, many years.

I am now involved in a company that works with Augmented Reality technology. I will talk about it in a future post, but just say it is something incredible, and the most important thing, USEFUL.

This was sometimes the problem. Great technology, impressive results, but no interesting and REAL application. But now, we are in a very interesting moment, some real applications of, e.g., Augmented Reality are being a reality.

Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real world and computer generated data. At present, most AR research is concerned with the use of live video imagery which is digitally processed and "augmented" by the addition of computer generated graphics. Advanced research includes the use of motion tracking data, fiducial marker recognition using machine vision, and the construction of controlled environments containing any number of sensors and actuators. Wikipedia definition of AR.

I have found two videos. Both quite interesting, and both describe in images, better than words, what Augmented Reality is.

In the first video, a demo of the company Total Immersion. Although no real or useful application is shown, you can guess some good fields in which this technology can help a lot (education, simulation etc.)

(if you have bandwidth problems, watch all the video until the end, and press 'play' again; normally the cache is going to help you the second time)



In the second one, a new concept called 'augmented map'. You can find more information here.