Augmented Reality (AR) !!!

Augmented Reality as a concept has existed for a long time now. When we watch Michael Phelps on TV, at the Olympics, tearing away through the water in a swimming pool, we can see the world-record line moving in front of him (which he eventually crosses many times). Here, the reality of athletes swimming has been augmented by the world-record line electronically—hence, it is called ‘augmented reality’. Another example closer home is during cricket matches when we see scores, run rates, etc. imprinted on the pitch while watching matches on television. Recent innovations have brought AR to all of us, thanks to the advent of powerful smartphones and tablets. We no longer need $200,000 cameras and millions of dollars worth of broadcasting equipment to experience and enjoy AR. We just need some cool apps on our smart devices. I think one of the pioneering AR apps is ‘Google Goggles’ on Android phones. One of the very good apps for the iPhone is ‘James May’—a very interesting app. It will be a lot cooler if we use it at London Science Museum. ‘Night Sky’ on the iPhone is another great app. We can simply go out into the open and use the app, and it will show the night sky above us, identifying planets, constellations, etc. There are literally dozens of such cool apps available on smart devices now. By the way, if you have seen Mission: Impossible 4 – Ghost Protocol, you have seen Augmented Reality in action. One of the agents uses an iPhone to scan the crowd at a railway station, in order to identify a specific person. When the person is found, the identifying information is overlaid across his image on the iPhone. If you really think about the building blocks needed to build such an app, they all exist now: 

- Camera/video camera in a phone 

- Face detection: cameras have had this functionality for years, a rectangle is  typically superimposed on faces in their viewfinders. 

- Plus the building blocks of ‘goggles’—a broadband network, cloud computing and big data for holding images and matching them with faces detected by cameras 

If I have the person recognition app that I mentioned above, I can use it in a variety of scenarios. Suppose we have been friends for a while but we have not been in contact with each other for a few years. Now we meet in a mall. You look very familiar but I cannot remember your name. Many of us face a similar embarrassing situation. It will be cool if I can surreptitiously take out my smartphone and recognize you using an AR app that I have described above. However, with wearable computers like Google Glass, person recognition could be a lot easier. Businesses and military are using AR in very innovative ways. As in the consumer world, there are dozens of such uses. Some examples are: China’s biggest food e-commerce merchant, Yihaodian, recently launched 1,000 virtual stores right outside the bricks and mortar stores of their competitors; each ‘store’ is packed with discount coupons. Customers must point their phones outside the competitor’s stores to find Yihaodian’s coupons and gift vouchers. Defense contractor company, Innovega, signed a contract with the Defense Department in the USA to develop a prototype of its iOptik system. The contacts work in conjunction with special glasses that project images onto the wearer's lens, which could allow soldiers on the ground to see images beamed down directly to them by drones or satellite. There is interesting research going on to improve our depth perception with AR, which has great uses in medicine. For example, currently, when a surgeon uses a scope during surgery, he may be using a scalpel, but typically has to look sideways or at an overhead monitor. It will really help if he or she can look directly at the patient and virtual objects appear exactly aligned inside the patient's body—X-ray vision! Finally, there are different forms of reality: Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Alternate Reality, Substantial Reality and Altered Reality. As detailed in this column, when useful virtual information is overplayed on real scenes, it is called Augmented Reality. If we can manipulate the virtual objects in Augmented Reality, it is called Mixed Reality. If we roam around in the physical world and collect virtual objects, it is called Alternate Reality. The game ‘Google Ingress’ is an example. Substantial Reality is a cognitive science concept; for instance, showing videos of current scenes and past recorded scenes and switching between them rapidly— as in the movie Inception. This is used to diagnose cognitive dysfunctions in psychiatric patients. When our natural senses are enhanced using AR, it is called Altered Reality. For example, if our equipment includes a camera that is sensitive to long-wavelength infrared, we can detect subtle heat signatures, allowing us to see which seats in a lecture hall had just been vacated. So, AR has excellent uses in our personal and professional lives. Its use will only increase especially with advances in wearable technologies like Google Glass.