November 4, 2009

Augmented Reality on iPhone Apps

Today I want to talk about something popular in the iPhone golden world and is becoming a "must" for all the new cool applications: Augmented Reality.
Augmented Reality is a superimposing of a virtual objects generated from a computer with the real world captured from a camera. Synthetic object are placed into the real world by register them with the real space. A complete definition of Augmented Reality can be found in Wikipedia.
Who see the scene, perceive that the synthetic object is immersed into the real world.
Conventionally this technique is used to augment information given by the real world like for example superimposing a radiography or a tomography image of a patient over the real image of the patient itself.
This imply that your virtual world has to be registered with the real one by using drown patterns (like for example ARToolkit does) or marker placed on real world.
Recently, iPhone application shown this technique a bit altered (from the classical definition of AR) in my opinion. The synthetic elements shown in the device were not directly correlated to the images shown by the camera, but instead they were related with the position or orientation of the device.
I think that we are still far from having the "real" Augmented Reality on mobile devices with real-time rendering and high resolution that will do the user believe that what he is seeing is real.

Thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment :-)

No comments:

Post a Comment