This is the second post in my coverage of Mobile World Congress (see also the first post with my first impressions and the major trends at the MWC). Today I finished reading the 30-odd position papers for the upcoming Mobile Augmented Reality Summit, and while I am not yet at liberty to share the location of the papers, I took the time to write down what I think is the rough consensus among the participants, before the summit itself.
The rough consensus on mobile augmented reality seems to be the following: Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR or just AR) is a field with a lot of potential, but it is still in its infancy. Yet, 2009 has seen MAR in the spotlight and receiving a lot of attention and hype. All the players thus feel that they need to make progress, and make it fast.
There is no doubt that the current breed of mobile AR tools are, for the most part, a new generation of what was called « mashups » only a few years ago: superposition of several sources of information, mostly based on geolocation metadata. Indeed, one of the basic technology used for mobile AR (KML) is the same being used for google maps, the darling child of the mashups hype. This geolocation-based technology is already being useful, but there seems to be an agreement among the industry that AR needs to go beyond the current state of the art to really shine.
The path forward, according to many, will necessarily take the shape of strong, fast and effective visual recognition. While a lot of progress has already been made in providing AR services through markers (usually barcodes, or NFC tags). Others, however, think that the real value to the user will not necessarily come from technological breakthroughs, but with the smart use of the existing framework, and the solving of some of the most pressing policy issues, with privacy for instance: with the integration of the physical world and online information mass becoming more and more seamless, how do we ensure the right to privacy and mitigate the effects of « too much information » being available on everyone at everyone’s fingertip?
You can also read the position paper I wrote for Pheromone on MAR here.
Tags: Augmented Reality, barcelona, MAR, mobile, MWC