Pius Binder's Blog: Dezember 2010

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality aims to copy the world’s environment in a computer. In many cases the output of the coding of augmented reality is seen on a display. Augmented reality generates information of the real world on the user’s display. The aim of augmented reality is to increase the information available for the environment with which the user is interacting. Further Augmented reality tries to blend virtual reality with the real world thus users can’t distinguish anymore between real and virtual augmentation. Nowadays augmented reality is used in entertainment, for military training, engineering design, robotics, manufacturing and other industries.

In this blog entry I’d like to introduce new technologies within the framework of augmented reality:

World Lens (by http://questvisual.com/)

An application for the IPhone which is an instant translation app. By pointing the camera at anything which contains readable text, it translate the text imediately in the language you want.

But at the moment there is only a English-Spanish version available which costs $4.99 and I hope that the profucts available will broaden.

Here is a the youtube video of World Lens (nice music too☺)

Layar (by http://www.layar.com/)

Layar is the so-called “first application of augmented reality”, this tool uses additional information to develop a blend between reality and virtuality. The layer tool is only the basis for other tools, which want to implement their information on the main tool. Generally this tool should facilitate users information search in a city: where are restaurants, houses to buy, subway stations, …

Here is the video we have already seen during our THBA class but I still find it quite fascinating (if the bandwidth and capabilities of smartphones once make it possible to use such a tool runny).:

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