Augmented Reality – Beyond Eye Candy
Augmented Reality has officially met the blogosphere. On Twitter alone, there can be as many as fifty posts per hour linking to demonstrations. Our beloved technology is leaving the playpen of developer forums and moving to the boardrooms of major corporations, but at what cost? For, with the exception of mobile GPS/Compass applications like Layar and TwittAround, most recognition based demos hitting the mainstream (that aren’t post production viedo effects for “concept” pieces) have one thing in common – they’re just browser based eye candy.
For now, visual examples get your company recognition. In a genre that has few applications accessible to the public, the “wow” effect goes a long way. In a few months, though, AR will be somewhat common in the mainstream. The average person is going to have the same mind set that people in the know about the technology already have – why waste the time printing a marker just to see a cheesy 3D model pop out? The obvious direction for developers attempting to position themselves in AR is to begin making fully interactive applications, and the tech is available.
Imagine the ability to go to a URL, launch a Flash application, and control a character through an AR adventure game, or drive a car with nothing more than a paper steering wheel. Or shop online? Right now, while most platforms don’t have practical uses of these concepts, Flash AR does. Flash also adds a level of consumer access unavailable to any other AR capable plug-in, in that over 85% of computers already have it installed. In essence, FLARToolkit is poised to be the dominant platform for Augmented Reality.
Most people don’t keep up with the latest AR releases, while even less know how it works, in the first place. It’s the job of the developer to enlighten others of the possibilities of Augmented Reality with Flash. When an executive says that he wants to break into AR by putting a character on a marker and having it dance around, the smart developer says, “sure, but we can do more than that.”