Mobile phones used to be just that… a phone that wasn’t tethered to a land-line. Early models came with a duotone screen, an alarm clock, and a four-function calculator. Text messages were unheard of, and the only mp3 players on the market were no-name brands and the first-generation iPod. Drive space was limited to little more than the capacity of the SIM card.
Lately, with improvements in miniaturization enabling us to hit the lower limit of comfortable cell phone size, electronics makers have been trying to cram every technology imaginable into the devices they sell. Today’s smart phones come with a multitouch-screen with millions of colors, camera, mp3 player, GPS, compass, accelerometers, 4GB (or higher) hard drive, and of course, microphones, speakers, internet, and text messaging.
Augmented Realty. For Rent apartment-finding Augmented Reality App written with Layar.
Similarly to how the six simple machines were considered the building blocks of early inventors, builders, and engineers, these phone capabilities have become the basic components of every popular phone application available in mobile stores. Google maps combines the GPS and internet capabilities to provide directions and location information. Shazam uses a microphone, mp3 capabilities, and internet access to identify and locate music. Thousands of other apps use every capability of the phone to meet practically every need available. Applications that don’t combine at least two of the capabilities of the phone are either novelty or incomplete.
One of the most impressive combinations of available technology has been augmented reality applications. Augmented reality, or AR for short, supplies you with additional data as you observe the environment around you. The concept for augmented reality has been around for decades. The head-up display has assisted military and commercial pilots for decades. And now, phones are capable of mimicking this behavior for the average person.
So, what’s needed for augmented reality? Well, for starters, a camera. The camera can see what you see, and provide an image to represent “reality” and augment with additional information. Unless you’re in a very limited environment, you’ll need internet access to pull down information about what you’re looking at. With its narrow angle of view, you need a compass to tell the application what direction you’re facing, and the accelerometers to provide information about vertical viewing angle. The GPS relays location information and pinpoints the location of points of interest. The combination of these technologies allows for a wealth of possible applications.
Despite the diverse mastery of technologies required to make an AR application, two prominent projects have already popped up in iPhone and Android stores. Yelp is credited with writing the first AR iPhone application, providing information about local businesses. Layar soon followed, with a free, open framework for searching for and creating your own AR applications. I took this opportunity to develop an apartment-finding application for For Rent Media Solutions (see picture above). It was easy, fun, and a great learning experience.
There’s some debate on how large this market will grow and what it will mean for businesses. As a pure technology guy, I appreciate the potential that it offers – and have confidence that the sales guys will find opportunities for the technology to provide value to brands.
So what’s next for mobile phones? What other technologies can we cram in there? An RFID reader? Infrared? Improvements in existing technology could bring us in some interesting directions… A better camera could read barcodes, and GPS improvements can provide better detail on your surroundings. Perhaps soon we’ll be able to create a 3-d model of our environment using our phone’s camera and GPS, just by holding up our phone as we walk through it.
We live in interesting, exciting times.
