The Augmented Reality … for which Reality?

Oct 16, 2014

Sogeti Labs

It is now easy for people to switch from the real world to a virtual one. We do it all the time… sometimes unconsciously. Augmented Reality (AR) starts here. By creating a composite view mixing real scenes of the real world and virtual scenes created by a computer, it augments the reality with additional information. There are different kinds of AR:

The virtual information is shown based on the user’s geolocation (e.g. the smartphone’s camera indicates where the closest subway station is when filming).

The virtual information is presented over the real scene by identifying a tag. The Lego Digital Box shows a 3D representation of the content of the box when the barcode is recognized.

The virtual information is represented on a screen when a real object in the scene is recognized.

Sounds like science fiction to you? Not anymore! Thanks to recent technical improvements, real usage can be developed, helping people dealing with the large amount of data and their complexity.

Today a lot of applications are in the consumer domain. We use all of them unconsciously through our smartphones and applications like HERE City Lens to discover shops around me, or Wikitude, Layar, Around Me, etc. But their adoption is slowed down by the lack of common AR frameworks across platforms (iOS, Android, Windwos Phones …). I am very proud to have contributed to the development of such a framework with my Sogeti colleagues. This is SoReal:

Professional applications are less common. But could be used in many different domains such as medicine, defense, robotics, manufacturing, maintenance and repair, etc. There again, professional adoption of AR is currently limited by the amount of information to process and its complexity, the accuracy of the virtual information and its positioning and the real world components recognition, which is much more complex.

Technology improvements and AR evolutions let us foresee big evolutions and new capabilities for professional use. However we see an increase of usage in professional domains coming from consumer ones – e.g. “Nokia city Lens” or “Around me”-like applications are used by professionals to locate their Point Of Sales, infrastructure or devise, etc.

I will detail in a later post the professional usage capabilities of AR, especially in the medical domain.

About the author

Sogeti Labs

SogetiLabs gathers distinguished technology leaders from around the Sogeti world. It is an initiative explaining not how IT works, but what IT means for business.

Comments