Re: Open standards augmented reality

Rich Tibbett wrote:
> Robin Berjon wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I just came across this:
>>
>> http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/35065/?p1=A1&a=f
>> https://research.cc.gatech.edu/polaris/
>>
>> I was wondering if anyone here was aware of this work, had thoughts,
>> etc. related to rechartering.
>>
>
> As I understand it, the current standards development of the device
> element [1] gives us webcam access and then geolocation [2] and
> orientation [2] give us the spatial awareness required to develop
> augmented reality experiences in the browser.
>
> It would be nice to then expose a whole host of sensors that provide
> more context to the current environment: temperature, light, gravity,
> pressure, proximity. These are things that we could (and I propose that
> we should) recharter with.
>
> The other concern is the performance hit of doing AR in JavaScript -
> especially on mobile devices.
>
> I expect a JS AR library to pop up and lead the way here. It might
> utilize Workers and WebGL rendering and browsers are quickly becoming
> fully hardware accelerated. At that point, if we're seeing significant
> unresolvable problems with AR performance in the browser, we should
> regroup and see if we could offload some of the more intensive
> processing to the compiled nature of the browser. Until then, I'm happy
> to stay quiet on whether loading AR in to the browser is necessary or
> even if its a good idea in the first place and let 3rd-party libraries
> lead the way on AR - as long as we're providing the essential building
> blocks to AR experiences in browser (such as camera, geolocation and
> orientation).
>
> In terms of the formats of geolocation data, I'm happy to leave that to
> the open market. 3rd party AR libraries are going to support whatever
> works for them at the time, whether that's KHARMA or otherwise (e.g. the
> Geonames format).
>

We just released an Opera Mobile for Android build featuring 
experimental support for the <device> element [1] and device orientation 
events [3]:

http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2011/03/14/web-meet-device

What we are underplaying is that this is the first public browser build 
ever to provide all of the basic standards necessary to develop the 
first native augmented reality experiences in web browsers.

I'd really like to see some 3rd party libraries spring up to provide 
augmented reality experiences around this build. That makes it possible 
to experiment on suitable POI formats and data going forward (as 
mentioned above).

Please let us know if you have any feedback on this release and remember 
to point us to any cool stuff you decide to make in the mean time :)

Kind regards,

Rich

>
> [1]
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/commands.html#devices
> [2] http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html
> [3] http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source-orientation.html

Received on Monday, 14 March 2011 11:04:23 UTC