Let’s Get to Work!
BLOG POST ZERO 5-of-5: This blog post is the 5th of a series of 5 posts. These 5 posts were also cross posted to my Linkedin account as a single article
The hard work lies ahead of us. There are still some technology gaps. The current positioning technologies are OK but we need more consolidation of GPS with SLAM or plane recognition, etc. I would say we can charge ahead as enough good people need to solve this issue so it will improve dramatically over the near term. There are some OK alignment techniques/technologies coming online. Mapbox has some manual alignment stuff available in their SDK for Unity. ESRI also has some tools buried in their ArcGIS SDK. These, and the others out there pretty much require manual intervention which will not work on a mass adoption scale.
It seems like Apple, Google, etc. are mostly waiting for development of full blown 3D city models. Apple is dabbling with projects like their indoor maps program. The chaps at Dent Reality, out of London, have leveraged it to start doing a discrete indoor AR map-app solution. Facebook also recently acquire Mapillary which is surely more than just about maps and has big-time AR indictions.
The guys at Augmented.City are doing some interesting and valuable work trying to first build spatially indexed cities using a crowdsourcing method, then providing geolocated AR tags. This approach does head down the path towards solving the problem. You can lock into a local coordinate system once they have created and indexed a local “AR cloud” of your location. However, to map a significant number of cites, let alone the entire face of the earth, seems a bit like trying to empty the sea with a teaspoon. I think some combination of Tango like machine vision, real-time spatial mapping linked with AI and known maps will be the best path but who knows? I’ll just implement what solution emerges as the best available.
On the survey-grade front, Trimble has released the SiteVision solution. To me it looks a bit like a kludge, a handle with a phone and a GPS antenna strapped to it, (I’d like to see the original duct-taped prototype) but admittedly, also seems fit-for-purpose. It starts to solve the problem but isn’t simple, isn’t free, or at least doesn’t feel free.
I will reiterate, we need to deliver a simple method to deliver this essentially complex technology. We need to find business models that remove the barriers to adoption but leave some meat on the bones, some revenue for the makers. So much of what we need is here, ready to be configured into valuable solutions. Global cloud access is proliferating as various networks / technology-plays expand their coverage and bandwidth. We’ve been collecting the “location of Things” for our lifetimes. The IoT has started to spawn the creation of necessary indexes back into the data. The display mechanisms on our mobile devices, the glasses, heads up displays, etc. are all already workable.
It’s all there for the taking. Will we be able to paddle like hell, drop in and catch the wave? I don’t want to just leave it here, but my AR mashed potatoes are getting cold and I need to get back to them. I, for one, have waxed my board. I’m watching for the swell and waiting for the next set to roll in. If someone sees them breaking outside, please do give me a yell and I’ll try to paddle out to catch that outside break if that’s where it’s happening. I hope to see some of you out there with me; it is going to be one hell of a ride.
A Final Thought
Rod Serling opened the television show The Twilight Zone with this monologue “There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.”
Rod was describing the Twilight Zone, but this is exactly how I see the future of AR; a vast and awesome dimension of access to the knowledge of the ages, just beyond our natural senses.
I thank you for reading. I thank Wikipedia for always having appropriate and useful links to act as my digital footnotes. Follow me on twitter, comment here or contact me if you’d like to talk about any of this or maybe better yet, just get to work delivering on this promise.