Comments on: Open AR: what's the point?

By: where’s the auggie? six methods for specifying location in mobile AR « the connected world

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:40:39 +0000

[...] a follow up to my post on location standards for mobile augmented reality, I’ve been thinking about how an AR author would specify the location of virtual objects in [...]

By: Damon Oehlman

Damon Oehlman — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:45:42 +0000

Great post, and while AR is only an area that I have recently gotten into I think the proposition of open standards is an excellent one. The Augmented Reality space is very interesting right now, especially around the particular topic of GeoAR. It’s getting a lof of press and entrepreneurial interest (which I can understand), however, these two external influences are probably going to shift towards proprietary standards rather than open.

I would definitely expect that whoever ends up with a dominant market share in the GeoAR browser space will probably end up with a defacto standard, that will then be defined as an open standard through a process of arbitration. Generally, that standard is not the most technically elegant, but will do the job for current and probably next generation of GeoAR applications.

In parallel, the technically elegant revisions required to take the technology forward will be applied over a period of time to the standards and all willing parties will jump board (a few will go rogue, they always do).

Still, I agree, the sooner intelligent people such as yourself start discussing these standard with others (and that includes knocking on the doors of companies such as Layar and Moblizy) the better.

Thanks again for a great post.

By: Gene

Gene — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:50:30 +0000

Tim, I’m looking forward to seeing Robotvision! Now that OS3.1 is here, it should be any day now, right?

Joe, since you argued for open AR as analogous to the web’s openness, I’ll ask you what I’ve been asking other folks: can/should an AR system be built using RESTful design principles? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer for example.

By: Joe Ludwig

Joe Ludwig — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:53:38 +0000

This is certainly an area that needs some standardization. Pretty much everyone is using lat/lon, but even for those two, they aren’t all using exactly the same notion. Layar, for instance, requires that you pass these coordinates back after multiplying them by 10^6. Some use positive and negative numbers to indicate hemisphere, while others use NSEW.

Altitude is in a similar state with respect to precision, and has the added complication of specifying the origin. I believe KML lets you specify that an altitude is relative to sea level (WGS-84, presumably), “ground level”, or absolute.

At least nobody is using feet and inches for anything. :)

By: Tim Sears

Tim Sears — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:53:20 +0000

Great post, and you’re dead-on about how Geographic AR points are being displayed.

This was something I took into quite a bit of consideration when creating Robotvision, in that I wanted to provide an element of depth to represent distance without decreasing the size of the points to keep it easy to read.

The problem with my approach is that where the points are positioned on the y-axis is not directly proportional to the distance. Distance is a factor, but if you want to look across a broad radius, your viewport might wind up very large for the y-axis (looking up and down).

It’s going to be interesting to see what user feedback is like regarding my approach and others as more browser hit the market. Perhaps it will be the users who dictate what usability and presentation conventions we adopt and standardize on for mobile AR experiences.