Today a person connected to the Internet, especially one with a mobile Web service, can receive and create unlimited amounts of digital information. Using social networks we read every word a person is typing (maybe even every word they are thinking), see every step another person takes, know when people are awake, asleep, in love or in pain. With social networking, and with mobile community services in particular, people are continually swimming in a “sea” of personal information. It is a sea because it seems unlimited in all directions, to be moving as if in waves with the natural turning of the planet.

For some the feeling of the sea, of all these people always connected to one another, is warm. There is a sense of closeness with family and friends (and in some cases with perfect strangers) which could not be achieved any other way than through the digital platforms we share.

The result, for many, is that the information noise level is very high. Noisy environments often cause fatigue, impatience, and make it very difficult to focus on the people who are physically with us or the tasks which we must achieve.

In the last six months, there are technology developments which will help us use our mobile Internet connected devices to follow and be “in touch” with more of the places and objects around us and in a way that is similar to the way social networks have connected people to one another. If you have even only 30 minutes, take these to learn and think about Mobile Augmented Reality.

What is Mobile Augmented Reality?

In the broadest sense, the “mobile AR” use case is that of a person moving with input (detection) and output (presentation) devices through an environment which is not highly-instrumented; the user is seeking AR experiences with one or more devices which use a variety of potential sources of contextual data. The triggers for this contextual data can include GPS, compass, image processing (e.g. natural feature recognition, a marker or QR code), and, in the extreme case, the interior of a space, a building or a cave, whose dimensions are also within the database to which the user’s devices have access.

Mobile AR applications or services can use an off-the-shelf hardware platform, such as a mobile telephone or personal digital assistant with pre-integrated sensors (GPS or camera, for example). The most popular mobile AR devices are Android and iPhones. A user might also have a custom-designed system of any specification as long as they can carry it without assistance and the device is not connected to its database by a physical cable of fixed length.

Mobile AR can be both indoor and outdoor. Naturally, the scope of “Outdoor AR” includes that portion of mobile AR for which the use case is outside of any building or shelter. Mobile AR includes that portion of Outdoor AR which is accessible with a device a user can carry without assistance, that is not connected to a server by means of a physical cable and is entirely outside a highly-instrumented environment.

Screen showing Real Estate Layar in Amsterdam

At the time of this blog, there are more than about a dozen examples of Mobile AR using GPS and compass available in Western Europe, Japan, Korea and the United States. They are available for users on iPhones (NearestTube by AcrossAir http://www.acrossair.com/, Sekai Camera by Tonchidot http://tonchidot.com/, WorldBrowser by GeoVector http://www.geovector.com/, just to name three) and on Android devices (Wikitude by Mobilizy http://www.mobilizy.com/ and Layar by Layar http://www.layar.com/).

There is also a beta mobile AR application for Symbian devices called ARound (developed by SequencePoint Software) and there are many, many others coming (e.g., metaio announces Junaio http://www.junaio.com/)

metaio’s Junaio screen showing Mobile AR game

It is not a new concept and many of the technologies which enable Mobile Augmented Reality have been around in laboratories for several years. Researchers have envisioned Augmented Reality for mobile devices, in both indoor and outdoor settings for nearly 40 years. To learn more about the history and to see the timeline of mobile AR, with a strong emphasis on research milestones, see the ISMAR History of Mobile AR page.

What is new is that it is now available for consumers. People with a mobile Internet device with a camera (and, for some applications, a GPS and compass) can discover the world which is in their immediate proximity or at a distance.

What will it bring?

When the mobile Internet device with camera, GPS and compass is held up (pointing at the world) and the camera is open/operating while the Mobile AR application is running, Mobile AR brings a new user interface to digital information about objects and places which are in the camera’s view. In many cases, the “sea of information” which you can see appear on (and disappear from) the screen has already been available to you via a Web browser. For example, Wikitude associates information from Wikipedia to geo-location tagged places. With the Mobile AR browser application, you can see the same information in text overlaying the place on the screen.

The new Mobile AR user interface virtually “attaches” digital information to, and “augments” the real world. Today the information supply which can be accessed through a Mobile AR “browser” of the world is large but very still very impersonal. It is like the days before Web 2.0, before the Web became social.

Mobile AR developers recognize that there will be Social Augmented Reality. User Generated Content will be attached to people as well as to places and objects and visible as an overlay instead of on a map. For example, Tweetmondo http://www.tweetmondo.com/ is an application which allows the user to “see” on a map (not in an AR browser, yet) where there are tweets. Mobilizy has developed a UGC web interface so that people can publish their own information about places http://www.wikitude.me

People who are digital natives, were born and have grown up with the Internet—the GenMobileC—will feel perfectly at home, carrying their Internet device maybe attached to some special glasses while swimming in the increasingly busy sea of information around them