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2010 (A)R-evisited

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Happy new year, may all your dreams come true!

After a brief break to catch our breath and have a much-needed holiday, Synthetic Toys is back up and running. This time we attempt a recap of 2010 in the area of Augmented Reality (AR).  AR has drawn much attention through the past year, almost a decade after we started working on the subject. Although the ‘hype’ surrounding the field is quite a lot we are still skeptical about recent ‘advancements’ and how these will shape the way AR evolves.  We will attempt to look into things aided from notable sources and offer our predictions and hopes for the field in 2011. One thing is for sure. AR is as interesting as it ever was, if not more, now that people begin understand its idiosyncrasies and pitfalls as well as its potential.

Handheld AR

Handheld AR is probably the sector that became more popular during 2010 with many companies offering AR-related applications, attracting lots of public attention [3,6]. Companies like Layar, Wikitude, Metaio and Qualcomm presented applications within this paradigm. The general idea is to use a smartphones modalities – GPS, compass, camera and wireless/GSM – in combination to superimpose 2D and 3D information in space using primarily the phones screen as a presentation medium. Examples of each company’s approach can be seen on their websites. In our minds we separate Handheld AR applications in two categories. Those that use a tangible reference for registration – like Qualcomm’s game using a camera tracked marker – and those that use a non-tangible one, like GPS and compass. Marker-less registration kind of falls between these categories but can be potentially more important.

Qualcomm & Mattel on Augmented collaborating on Reality

We at Synthetic Toys are thrilled with the current popularity of AR but can not help to remain skeptical on how current, marketing-driven, popularity can lead to the maturity of AR. But more of this further on…

3D Displays

3D Displays – HMD-less or not – have also gained lots off attention the last year, due to the appearance of blockbuster titles like Avatar in 3D. Big players like Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, Mitsubishi and Philips introduced such displays in the market, in an effort to capitilize on the technology. Generally, HMD ones are not as easy to use due to various issues such as ocular and non-ocular symptoms, as commented on a previous post and require further research [10]. For this reason many researchers, including companies like Apple and Microsoft experiment with 3D displays that do not require a spectacles-type apparatus, but instead rely on different modalities to determine orientation of gaze [11]. Although the currently available solutions are at their infancy we feel this paradigm is quite promising and there is lots of potential and opportunities for research. Particularly, in conjunction with smartphones, where viewing distance is more or less easily determined, such displays can enhance handheld AR to another level, without requiring from the users to wear ‘dorky’ HMDs.

Kinect

Right from the moment of its release, Microsoft’s Kinect became a very popular gadget with hackers, with open-source drivers appearing immediately after its European release. Kinect can have a sizeable impact in the field, as many believe it is one of the best AR-related sensors in the market. Anything that can provide information on the user’s movements in real time has to be pretty useful in AR context. James McQuivey, Consumer Product Strategy analyst at Forrester, had written two weeks prior to the release of Kinect that it “is to multitouch user interfaces what the mouse was to DOS. It is a transformative change in the user experience, the interposition of a new and dramatically natural way to interact — not just with TV, not just with computers — but with every machine that we will conceive of in the future.” [4]. He further asked [5] “What will we call the new experiential medium that will result from natural user interfaces+3D+touch interfaces+augmented reality — technologies which are all conspiring in this decade to alter our lives?”

Augmented reality with hacked Kinect

Most researchers have used it to control software like word processors or games, like World of Warcraft depicted here but it is quite reasonable to foresee its use in AR applications. The popularity of Kinect is quite high and you can find some really nice AR-related experiments, such as the ones depicted in the video above, over the web. Moreover, the technology behind Kinect – or indeed part of it  – may soon be available to PCs enabling researchers and developers to use it in different scenarios with greater ease.  For us Kinect does one simple thing. Places the sensory modalities ‘away’ from the proximity of the user. Now, how about making a 3D display that is away from the user, independent of viewing distance and angle and… oh yes, we talked about that on the previous section…

Standardisation

One of the subjects often discussed in workshops and conferences is the need for stadardisation in AR. Many of the aforementioned AR players, researchers and institutions have debated on whether it is time for AR to have such standards. Granted standardisation does offer some benefits through unification, interoperability, reliability and predictability.

We feel that AR standardisation deserves a thorough examination and we will look into the subject in detail in the future. We are also keen on seeing the results of an AR Standards Meeting in Barcelona on February, expected to attract the interest of many important players in the field. However, we feel its a tad too early, mainly because we are reluctant to believe that AR has matured enough and that the current ‘call’ for standards is more market-driven than a technological necessity.

And that brings us to…

Our opinion

2010 was a year with a lot of publicity of AR, with many people getting involved and lots of new ideas flying around. But that is not necessarily a good thing. Augmented Reality has been around for quite some time – we’ve been researching it for over a decade – and approaching the field with the ‘naivety’ of modern marketing will not get far. In fact we are afraid that people are ‘over-hyped’ with AR and they will be disappointed soon, once they find the technology has limitations at the current state of things. Most of the market hype is driven from the, undoubtedly clever and successful, publicity methods of the big players. Handheld AR in particular seems a very easy way of getting people to know the concept and getting a hands-on experience. And that is the way it should be during the beginning. But lets face it, after a while is simply a gimmick. And that is attributed, in our eyes, to the limitations of current technologies, particularly when related to registration and the level of immersion of the presentation. Moreover, the next set of services and applications will not only need to exploit technological advancement to the fullest but will also some ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking to devise new paradigms. But lets get into the gist of things…

Handheld AR is probably the flavour of AR that will remain fairly popular due to the evolution in smartphones and tablets. However, there will soon be dire need for new types of services that enhance the user’s day-to-day routines and reality. Enhancing the latter does not necessarily mean placing high quality 3D graphics around. Enhancement also can come as any type of information, whether visual, audible or as tactile feedback.

Mechanics allowing tethering and location awareness are of course of paramount importance. However, increasing accuracy and performance while maintaining multi-modality will allow more complex – not complicated – frameworks to develop new services. We also feel that interaction between users, within the AR space much like a shared environment can have an important role is the sense of immersion of users.

Leaving the domain of Handheld AR behind and speaking in more generic terms, Interfaces in the context of AR are always a very challenging subject. Although some progress has been made on non-HMDs, very little improvement has been observed in HMDs – and to that we have to agree with Tom Carpenter [6]. Bearing in mind our own experience with HMDs and the sense of immersion they bring to the table there is still a lot to be done to investigate different technologies as well as the side effects of HMD usage. Naturally, we await with great interest the developments on the glass-less front.

If one thing has advanced considerably and will continue to do so, pushing AR development further, is processing power, particularly in small form factor platforms. Smartphones are capable these days to render complex graphics with very good frame rates. Consumption and battery longevity is indeed an issue but not so much as in the past. Although technically it belongs to 2009, Epic’s demonstration of the Unreal Engine 3 on IPhone, shown bellow, aptly demonstrates what these handheld beasts can do.

iPhone 4 Unreal Game – Project Sword

Concluding, we have to admit our review is nowhere near as extensive and detailed it could be. We gathered the things that had made an impression to us, those that we feel are the more important ones. We are certain we missed something and that our assessment may be erring a bit on skepticism. We are, nonetheless. very excited about the publicity AR is receiving and we are also planning on ‘playing ball’ within the current market with some ‘gimmicks’ of our own.

References

[1] The Year in Computing
[2] Eye-tracking for mobile control
[3] The Year in Enhancing Reality
[4] Get Ready for Kintetic to Completely Change our Lives
[5] Killing Me Softly With Kinect…And Leading Me To The Next Big Thing
[6] Augmented Reality – Year in Review – 2010
[7] Android 3.0 Honeycomb has Google-Built in Augmented Reality?
[8] Has Augmented Reality Peaked?
[9] Augmented Reality: Pure Hype or the Next Big Thing in mobile?
[10] Is 3D bad for you?
[11] 3D without four eyes

Apple patents glasses-less 3D projection system

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Continuing on the theme of glass-less 3D displays mentioned a few days ago, The Register reports that Apple has patented a 3D display system that requires neither special glasses or ‘parallax’ screens that enables  “inexpensive auto-stereoscopic 3D displays that allow the observer complete and unencumbered freedom of movement.” The system’s concept revolves around the use of a combination of eye-tracking and a reflective display that monitors the position of the user and bounces the image from a projector so as to split 3D content for the left and right eye.

A diagram of how Apple's proposed 3D projection system would work. (Credit: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office)

A diagram of how Apple’s proposed 3D projection system would work. (Credit: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office)

Apple seems to agree more or less with our comments on our previous post (quotes are from the patent):

  • Volumetric displays, according to the patent, present images that “appear ghosted or transparent.”
  • The parallax barrier method “typically requires the observer to remain stationary in one location.”
  • Dynamically presented holographic images require “far greater computational ability and bandwidth than is generally required for [other auto stereoscopic displays]…in real time and at commercially acceptable costs.”

Apple’s effort is to first track viewers’ position and movement, and then use that information to guide the projection of pixels onto “a projection screen having a predetermined angularly-responsive reflective surface function.”. Each projected pixel is beamed onto a textured, reflective surface and reflected to the eyes of each viewer, separating left and right views and therefore producing a 3D effect. The projection angle changes according to the input of tracking sensors detecting user movement in relation to the screen.

Each pixel is aimed at a curved surface, where it reflects onto the correct eyeball

Apple assures us that it “valuably supports and services the historical trend of reducing costs, simplifying systems, and increasing performance”. We could not agree more on this philosophy.  What remains to be seen is whether Apple will actually realize such designs. We say they will.

A Mobile Era

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Technology Review has a nice post on the current state of the mobile phones industry, with emphasis on the social implications. You can find it here. While reading it I was thinking of the time when mobile phones were not as smart as today, PDAs were much simpler than the cheapest phones of the last five years, I was building my first wearable computer and was holding Open Day AR demonstrations in the University of Essex. I remember the groups of parents that came to see the work done in the Vision and Synthetic Environments (VASE) Laboratory and how impressed they seemed, whenever I told them that the computers of the future will be our mobile phones. Small, context-aware, pro-active, always tethered to some form of network and operational for large periods of time. Of course, this was not my prediction but more or less what all researchers in mobile, wearable and ubiquitous computing envisioned back in the previous couple of decades.

The article from TR summarizes the current state of mobile phones, mentioning how all of the aforementioned ‘features’ and how they are currently being encountered. Notably, as Jaffrey Rayport, the article’s author states, we are outsourcing our memory to our devices. More and more information, like phone numbers, addresses, location notes and task-lists are stored in those tiny gizmos instead of our head. Our decisions are often automated through criteria based searches where as our collaboration and communication patterns are much more immediate compared to the past.

This is indeed the era of mobility. An era where we are not anymore pinned to a location but mobile, unthethered and immersed in a cloud of information. Instead this time, the information that concerns us is pinned to our environment. Kind of like the notice board, back in the university, during those demonstration days.

HMD-less 3D

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IEEE Spectrum has a very interesting article on HMD/Glass-less 3D systems on its December 2010 issue. You can read it here. The article presents past and recent efforts on creating 3D displays without using spectacle-type displays, discussing various techniques. We find the possibility of having 3D displays without the whole – arguably obtrusive – arrangement that comes with HMDs, quite fascinating. Some of the recent HMDs are indeed small and quite comfortable but at the end of the day we feel it would be more intuitive and… well, normal, not to wear them.

Panagiotis Ritsos with HMD

A not so normal pair of glasses

Nonetheless, as we understand it, the current systems work on a number of assumptions – such as distance from the screen, inter-ocular distance, posing certain usability restrictions.  Among the companies mentioned Nintendo, for example,  offers some adjustment for such variables in their prototypes in an effort to rectify these issues. Presumably an active (or real-time re-) calibration of the system could offer some transparency and independence to the user but that is a research subject on its own. Moreover, the techniques presented in the feature are governed – once again – by quality-cost-power consumption trade-offs, with obvious consequences on mobile usage such as portable game consoles or smart-phones. Still, the concepts are there and people keep pushing technology and that is the only way to go.

One aspect of 3D HMD displays, that the article comments on, is the ocular and non-ocular effects that often come as a result of HMD usage. In fact it is one of the aspects we on our past research efforts have examined to some extent. These issues, most often headaches and less often nausea and vomiting, are a true limitation of HMDs. Top that with with focus, luminance (for outdoor use), resolution, ghosting etc, things get messy quite fast. It is surprising – well maybe not so much if you want  to be cynical – that people do not mention these limitations when talking about ‘AR-hype’ . Arguably, the focus today is on handheld mobile AR, but nonetheless these limitations are present for years and researchers have investigated them to a large extent, particularly in the context of military simulators.

We know you can not market something when you focus or mention its problems (the aforementioned cynicism…) . As UX researchers though, in a broad sense, we need to take these things into consideration if we want to produce truly immersive and commercially successful systems.

Photorealistic Rendering for AR

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Probably the most impressive examples of AR I have seen in a while. Finnish VTT Team has done some impressive work in the past and this example is nothing sort of spectacular in my book. The video was recorded a Dell laptop with a Quadro FX 3700M video card, a Core Duo processor and a basic Logitech webcam. The graphics itself is drawn using OpenGL and GLSL.

VTT’s description of the above video is:

Photorealistic rendering for Augmented reality. Uses soft shadows, indirect lighting and image quality matching. Various materials like glass, chrome or plastic are possible. Lighting is automatically determined from a ping pong ball.

For us it is a demonstration how realistic things can appear with modern hardware – albeit not of the ‘handheld’ type – and GFX APIs, hinting that the more we push the envelop and exploit technological advancement, the more immersive things will appear.