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Hi, I'm Robert. I'm employed by a new media agency called Nascom where I look after the information architecture and user experience of things. |
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| Augmented Reality Navigation |
| Saturday, 21 June 2008 | ||||||
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The next generation of high-end mobile phones have a few things in common:
So I was discussing earlier this week with two of my colleagues how all this could be used in future mobile applications. We ended up thinking about a augmented reality navigation concept (and named it AUGNAV to keep things easy) which could look like this:
The camera could be used for input footage on which the phone augments a layer with virtual navigation information while driving. It would be capable of doing pattern recognition to detect road signs and correctly display the navigation path live on the footage.
Same thing for surfing the mobile web: just like Skype recognizes phone numbers on websites, we think it's fairly easy to come up with software that is able to spot addresses on contact pages and provide an instant touch-to-navigate button:
 University website with software rendered navigation button
Technically the live image pattern recognition and augmentation would be a bit too much for current mobile processors; but our guess is that will just be a matter of time.
We documented the ideas and limitations in detail within a scientific paper owned by the University for exploring research purposes. Available on request for interested developers.
21-06-2008 17:58 Glimpse of the future I think what I just saw was a glimpse of the future. It's actually a pretty obvious idea, but, like most of these seemingly obvious things, you "just have to think of it". Nicely done! :) 02-07-2008 14:21 Glimpse of the future Yes, hopefully these concepts become reality soon. We were hoping to conduct some user tests in complex traffic situations with this type of navigation vs. the old school top down view and illustrated 3D, since our - to be proven - hypothesis is that drivers might make significantly less mistakes with an augmented reality model. But that’s hard prove right now without a proper working prototype. 24-07-2008 17:09 working prototype At this moment we already have a mobile AR application running. It uses video calling (open standard), so you just need a 3G phone with a camera (and a big wallet to pay your phone bill). You switch your camera to the camera on the back of the phone and dial the number of our server. The server receives the video stream, detects and tracks the marker/image and returns an enridged video stream. Naturally with adding your GPS coords, the database narrows and comes with a faster reply. We have this running for a year now, but the market is not ready for this yet. Instead we introduce an 'in between solution'; With your mobile you take a picture and send it via e-mail or mms to our server. The server recognises the image and returns an url (the url can be a website, search result from google(maps), video stream, et cetera). This solution is cheaper for the user (data package instead of video calling) and cheaper to create the content (mostly already on the www). Hope that this adds some extra insights. 25-07-2008 12:56 working prototype impressive! saw something similar a few weeks ago by 2 german guys (enkin.net). i'm sure this will become a reality sooner rather then later. 26-07-2008 16:20 Text-to-speech Cool concept but I hope by the time this materializes the text-to-speech technology improves beyound the early 1980-ies level that we are still stuck with today :) 05-08-2008 21:26 vaporware good luck with this project. you have no idea what you are getting yourself into though :) 09-10-2008 18:09 Running mobile AR-Demo on Nokia N95 Hi guys, I love your mobile navigation concept (including the "instant touch-to-navigate button" idea!). We are working on AR from a commercial point of view since 6 years from now and we have a running mobile-app on Symbian S60 devices (best results on Nokia N95). The app is running on the client only so there is no need for money-shaking server/video calls. For free trials have a look at: http://www.metaio.com/products/mobile/ or send me a mail. Regards, Daniel 31-10-2008 16:16 Running mobile AR-Demo on Nokia N95 GREAT COOL. Where can i download an pay it?!?!?!? i hope this product will be come. 01-06-2009 00:40 Running mobile AR-Demo on Nokia N95 Garmin gave it a shot with their new travel pilots in the meanwhile. Read about it here: link 20-08-2009 16:37 Running mobile AR-Demo on Nokia N95 Robert: please get in touch. I want to write about this subject. I'm a freelance writer and European Editor of three US magazines. My email address is
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