Mobile AR
Posted in Technology on 17. Jun, 2009
Another flurry of Augmented Reality videos doing the rounds at the moment. This time, it’s about AR in mobile phones.
Via O’Reilly Radar, an AR Game called ARhrrrr where you run around a paper map with AR buildings shooting zombies.
Via Futurismic, an app called Layar -- a mobile augmented reality browser.
I suppose what these videos demonstrate is this being the newest of the new media. You can affect, interact and manipulate the information or you experience information in a 3D overlay. There are also two type of AR on show. The first one (I assume) uses barcodes and markers to set dimensions and the hardware adds the detail with loaded programming. The second one is uses GPS and an internal compass as positional tags to data request. It’s interesting to see which ways they both could go. I’ve looked at the barcode AR before, so let’s think about GPS AR
I haven’t found one, I’m guessing it exists or soon will, but what would interesting/useful is a mobile AR CAD program. Take your Android or iPhone and build a 3D object and assign a GPS to it. If it can shoot zombies, it can play with Lego. Or even build the object in the space you want it. When that happens, what will happen to the moderation? Does every one’s creation get put onto server’s for all browsers to access, creating a weird new search engine where we stand in a place and search for a word? Or will institutions provide there own apps with all the information preloaded and carefully constructed? I imagine both.
What concerns me in the first instances is what happens when a place finds out that someone has AR’d swear words all over a museum’s artwork or flooded the exhibition space with adult adverts? I think it will be the next mutation of cyber-squatting: your coordinates in GoogleAR are already dominated with a SecondLife style nightmare and what can you do about it?
Could Intellectual Property laws include coordinate-defined areas? “This model has been removed as it violates the GPSrights and Safesearch Filter of The Guggenheim Museum”.
Good post, Pete, I’d not seen the second one and it’s just what I was trying to describe to my wife this evening! I’d not thought at all about the IP issues around location but I don’t even wanna go there.
This is yet another example of the exciting new field of Mobile AR. Pete, regarding the GPS AR that you mentioned, perhaps you can look into “Virtual Graffiti” under development by Motorola. They have already filed for patenting just this year.