Use your mobile phone as a sophisticated display, not only to scan your surroundings, but also to highlight the most important information about what you see, like where your favourite eatery is, or which direction your bank’s nearest ATM lies.
This is augmented reality (AR), and this is what PivotAR - an augmented reality application framework - can potentially provide to everyone owning a feature-rich mobile phone. By adding a digital or virtual layer of information over the real world in real time, the software enhances what the user sees on the phone’s camera screen.
A brainchild of Mr Stephan February, Mr Mike Mazur, and Mr George Goh, PivotAR was the winning entry of the Information Technology Standards Committee’s code::XtremeApps:: 2009, an intensive 24-hour long programming competition held earlier this year.
PivotAR’s ratings system gives additional information about the establishment highlighted. |
“One of the competition themes was about smoking education and/or prevention,” said Mr Mazur. “One of the challenges was to aid smokers who were concerned with gaining weight when they quit, and we decided to implement an augmented reality interface to healthy eateries nearby.”
The team then used publicly available information from the Health Promotion Board's website to compile the list of healthy restaurants, and created an application to display restaurants in the vicinity
To do this, PivotAR uses a combination of Internet connectivity, Global Positioning System (GPS), live camera, and compass functionality, all of which can be found in many of the latest mobile phones. After gleaning the relevant information through these technologies, PivotAR layers location-based information over the camera’s viewfinder.
“Compared to existing GPS location-based applications, PivotAR's user interface is a paradigm shift,” said Mr Goh. “Instead of telling users where to go, the phone will know where the user is headed and highlight points of interest in that direction.”
The application also has a social component in that it not only provides information, but allows users to contribute and enhance the experience by allowing recommendations and ratings of each point of interest, like a restaurant for example.
PivotAR currently comprises two components: the client software which is currently only available on the Android platform, and a server which provides the information displayed on the handset. “The client and server communicate over the Web,” said Mr Mazur. “This means more clients can be developed, such as the iPhone, other mobile devices, or even a website.”
While the team continues to enhance the framework to find more and more interesting applications for it, Mr Mazur thinks that the augmented reality surface has not even been scratched. “We believe this is a technology so early in its development that the most interesting applications have not been thought of yet,” he said. “Augmented reality, by itself, is probably not a killer application, but bundled as a component in a bigger application it can add much value.”
“We are bouncing a few ideas around on which direction to take things,” Mr Mazur added, citing real-time location-based updates, marketing campaigns from merchants to users of the application, enhanced shopping guides and games which blend real-world and video games into one experience. “Our goal is to develop this technology into a generic AR platform so many different applications can be built on top,” he said.