After seeing the recent report made by the Swiss television on the use of augmented reality in E-commerce, I felt an urge to look back at a film made by the same television two years ago. The film explained very well what augmented reality was all about.
It featured Total Immersion, the EPLF (the Swiss polytechnic Institute in Lausanne) and Space3D Solutions.
It contained excellent images of Total Immersion’s augmented reality capacities such as a theme park attraction, animals turning in 3D above large markers and the use of catalogues to augment information. The news report explained that Total Immersion bought the technology from the EPFL for 7’000€. Then it showed how the EPFL used normal images as markers for augmented reality animations. The report is in French, but the film is fascinating and can be enjoyed just for the richness of the video.
At the time, Space3D was the value added reseller of Total Immersion in Switzerland. The report showed among other things how Space3D used paper tags as bracelets with augmented reality to attach virtual watches to the arm.
Well! At the time, that was cool. When several watch manufacturers recently came to Space3D to use the technology for this year’s Basel watch show, they were strongly urged them not to use it. The good companies followed the advice. It could have been interesting to do it two years ago for the buzz effect. But today it is not acceptable to show an expensive watch wiggling on top a fake paper watch and not sticking even slightly, to the arm. It links the perception of an inferior technology to the image of the watch. The companies using it should go back to marketing school or take a closer look at the people who proposed this to the top management.
But all this raises this fundamental question: has augmented reality really evolved in the last two years? Looking at that film makes this a very legitimate question.
The first good news is that augmented reality has gone mobile, even if for the moment the applications are strongly geo-localized.
For the applications using computers for the stronger computational capacities, the situation doesn’t seem to have evolved a lot. There are a lot of fairies turning on the top of fingertips. However a tremendous amount of work has been done on the research side.
At Space3D most of the efforts were put in stabilizing the processes. Before moving on to new capacities, a lot of hard work is being put in providing more robust solutions. What is the problem and why are watches not robustly attached to the arm or eyeglasses not correctly fitted behind the ears? Why do dresses seem to be made of cardboard and do not fit the bodies?
The answer is in the quality of the webcams and the strength of the algorithms that try to track the augmented reality targets.
Most webcams in the market are not usable for augmented reality even if the light conditions are optimal. The challenge facing the programmers is in trying to use advanced programming techniques, developed usually at the computer vision labs of universities, to compensate for the poor quality of the webcams. There is still at least a year before strong robust solutions are found. That is why most of the augmented reality applications we see are pretty much alike.
But several companies will come out with some very interesting stuff in the following months.
On the first of June, Space3D is giving a press conference jointly with the EPFL and the EPFL+ECAL Lab.
Stay tuned, it will be great.
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Wonderful journey and experience!
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