Augmented reality - the next mobile device battleground

Stuart Corner
Monday, 04 April 2011 11:57

Business IT - Technology

Vision based augmented reality - the melding of real world information gathered through the camera of a smartphone or tablet with related information sourced from the Internet - is poised to see the introduction of a whole range of killer apps, and Qualcomm has taken an early lead.

In October the company released an augmented reality software development kit for Android. It has already run a competition for augmented reality applications, has dedicated in-house team of AR technologists and visionaries based in San Diego, Seoul and Vienna and is collaborating with several academic institutions such as Georgia Institute of Technology in the US and the Graz Institute of Technology in Austria.

Augmented reality, however is in its infancy and the ultimate goal of Qualcomm is likely to be to gain a lead in the market for the chipsets that will be needed to enable future devices to support augmented reality applications.

When it introduced the AR platform and SDK, Qualcomm said: that is "uses computer vision technology to align graphics tightly with underlying objects. The approach is an evolution from current AR techniques that use a phone's GPS and compass for mapping applications. Vision-based AR enables a fundamentally different user experience in which graphics appear as if they are anchored to real world objects."

Herns Pierre-Jerome, Qualcomm's director of technical marketing, told ExchangeDaily that while today's top end smartphones have the processing grunt to support augmented reality applications they do not presently represent a sufficiently large market. And clearly as the technology evolves more powerful processors will be needed.

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