Augmented vision at Mobile World Congress 2011
At this year`s Mobile World Congress (MWC) metaio`s technology will be visible all over the place. The Unifeye Mobile SDK and the world`s most advanced AR browser junaio are being featured and presented on various platforms, devices, chipsets and exhibition stands. As a highlight the first integrated markerless 3D object tracking showcase will be presented. Furthermore CTO Peter Meier is sharing his vision and thoughts in two major augmented reality sessions . And last but not least metaio will present its roadmap for the junaio 3.0 release.
At least since Google CEO Eric Schmidt coined the phrase of an “augmented humanity” – for the last time within his keynote at the DLD conference in Munich two weeks ago – there is no doubt, that enriching the real world with virtual data is one of the game changing technologies of the future. Aligned by market forecasts saying that the “AR market” could be a 732 million dollar market (Juniper Research) already in the next five years and that the worldwide smartphone sales will exceed 1.1 billion by 2013 (Parks Associates) the whole mobile industry casts an eye on augmented reality. The technology is one of the hottest topics for this year`s MWC.
For widespread and daily usage however the whole eco-system – still in a phase between infancy and an adolescent hype – has to work closely together in order to deliver useful, robust, smooth and still fascinating augmented reality experiences. The “Wow” factor will expire, but the true potential will come out even beyond our imagination.
In order to take full advantage of augmented reality and to finally bring the technology to the mainstream of smartphone users, chipset manufacturers, carriers and technology providers have to cooperate closely. Improving the performance, experience, usability and capabilities of AR applications is crucial for broad adoption and daily usage.
metaio`s AR software Unifeye Mobile SDK and their AR browser junaio offer, for example, vision based AR and go far beyond compass/GPS based approaches. However, multimedia tightly registered to the physical space triggered by planar objects is computationally intensive and requires a tight integration of hardware and software. metaio CTO Peter Meier summarizes: “With the computational challenges of an augmented vision in mind, a markerless trackable real world, cooperations between hardware and software providers become even more important.”
Working closely together with leading chipset manufacturers for an optimized software/hardware integration is where metaio puts its development efforts – besides constantly working on new tracking methods and backend approaches with many patented solutions. The latest results will be shown at the Mobile World Congress 2011.
