Microsoft taps GeoVector for mobile augmented reality technology

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 14 July 2011 10:14

IT Industry - Strategy

Microsoft has licensed augmented reality technology from GeoVector to enable it to add augmented reality functions to its mobile devices.

According to GeoVector, "The patents included in the agreement cover augmented reality, pointing-based local search and other aspects of spatially aware mobile computing."

GeoVector, headquartered in San Francisco was founded in 1991 and filed its first augmented reality patent in 1993. Some of its earliest augmented reality mobile apps debuted in New Zealand. In 2002 it introduced 'Welcome to New Zealand', a mobile app that allowed visitors to use their devices to find out about the real world objects near them.  This was followed in 2003 by 'Actual Spectator', an augmented reality app for The New Zealand Americas Cup that enabled spectators to interact with their actual environment to receive an augmented view of the action. It was developed in partnership with HP, Microsoft and Vodafone NZ.

In September 2009, GeoVector launched World Surfer for the iPhone & Android platforms. It allows users to point their phones in a particular direction to search for retailers, restaurants and other points of interest.

However this is just the beginning. The next development in augmented reality is likely to be 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.

As ExchangeDaily reported earlier this year,  Qualcomm is aiming to take a lead role in this market. Herns Pierre-Jerome, Qualcomm's director of technical marketing, told ExchangeDaily that while today's top end smartphones have the processing grunt to support vision-based augmented reality applications - which can require real-time analysis of video captured by the phone's camera - they do not presently represent a sufficiently large market.

However in recent weeks several smartphones have hit the market using 1.2GHz dual core processors, so the penetration of these devices is likely to increase rapidly.

US analyst, Rob Enderle, has branded AR as Qualcomm's secret weapon saying: "The mobile industry will soon undergo a massive consolidation of the smartphone/tablet space. We simply have too many [chipset] vendors and Intel's focused entry later this year should force the ARM vendors to merge, some to fail, and only the strongest will survive.