This is the main screen as it will appear in the App. As you pan around, messages will pop on the screen to deliver information, which comes from a remote database containing geo-localized information.
The Exmart iPhone team is finishing up a sophisticated iPhone App called “TellMePlus”. Its main feature is Augmented Reality. In short, on mobile phones, with Augmented Reality the user can see through the lense of his iPhone camera a view of his surroundings, As he pans around, he can see messages pop up on the sreen with content that is related to the locations seen through the screen.
We did an investigation on AR more than a year ago on Android, and when we needed to get our hands on the real stuff, at first, we were thinking of using a platform like www.layar.com, since this is where we heard of AR first , as it was a solid system to develop an AR app. However, after some serious study, we found out that using Layar was not the right direction for us, because it is essentially a platform for non technical persons to publish their own layers data to the Layar.com browser, while Exmart needed to implement AR in a standalone app. So we decided to do it from scratch.
AR is a technology that encompasses several others: it uses concomitantly GPS, compass, camera and acceleratormeter programming. With the geographical mathematical computations, and 3D transformation, we mix the virtual object together with the real world in the camera view. Accompanied with user’s action, postion and facing, virtual objects will always keep pointing to the right place in real-time. Apart from the exciting mixing virtual and real world implementation, we introduced a radar which is really useful and interesting due to the precise location indication in both direction and range. User can zoom in or out visual range to show or hide unnecessary information and radar shows the status of visiblity of any object in range all the time.
AR technology can be used in all sorts of areas. In fact, many automobile based GPS systems are showing 3D scene around the user rather than a pure map view today; unfortunately many of them didn’t put the real background and GPS info together in the user’s view, which is exactly what an AR implementation is.
AR also can be widely applied in IM or entertainment applications; a lot of game ideas can make use of AR, such as SNS or sims-like game.
Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.
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