Tuesday, 21 April, 2020 UTC
Summary
Previously we learned a few basic concepts of Augment Reality. In this post, I’ll be discussing Web AR, the next big thing in Mobile Augment reality (MAR).
With the advances in today’s mobile web browsers and operating systems, we can now deliver AR experiences through a mobile Web browser — no App necessary. The promise of using your mobile device and camera to unlock digital content is happening today.
Web AR now allows you to utilize computer or data visualization without the need of downloading an App, using a combination of technologies including WebRTC, WebGL, WebVR, and the modern sensor API’s.
Web AR now allows you to utilize computer or data visualization without the need of downloading an App, using a combination of technologies including WebRTC, WebGL, WebVR, and the modern sensor API’s.
This works for both Android and iOS devices. Yes, all mobile phones.
pic credit: http://www.createwebxr.comImplementation Mechanisms
The advances in mobile devices, including computing and display platforms, provide more choices for the implementation of AR applications. In accordance with the tracking technologies, we detail the typical Mobile AR implementation mechanisms in terms of three aspects, that is, sensor-based, vision-based, and hybrid tracking methods.¹
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The sensor-based method is a relatively lightweight Mobile AR implementation approach, while in contrast, the vision-based approach places high demands on the computing and storage capabilities of the runtime platform, as well as network capability. As shown in Fig. below, the hybrid tracking mechanism is obviously a compromise solution.
Pic credit: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8643424Let's talk briefly about above-mentioned mechanisms.
- Sensor-Based Mechanisms: Mobile devices nowadays already support a variety of sensors, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, compasses, magnetometers, GPS, and so on.
For example, Pokemon GO provides AR experience by enabling the camera to capture the surrounding environment, but only for the display of the environment as the background.
Considering the complexity of computation, storage, and networking, this lightweight Web AR implementation mechanism is currently the lowest option for users to get started. - Vision-Based Mechanisms: The camera on the device captures the surrounding environment, but it further provides the basis for vision-based object recognition, detection, and tracking. This type of mechanism is used to pose information to align the virtual content with real-world objects. However, it introduces heavy computational pressure on mobile devices, especially for natural feature tracking methods. Besides the improvement of device capability, the advances in-network (e.g., the upcoming 5G networks) will provide another approach to the problem of inefficient Web AR application performance, i.e., computation outsourcing.
- Hybrid Tracking Mechanisms: The hybrid Mobile AR implementation mechanism is a mid-way, taking into consideration the computational inefficiency of mobile devices. It overcomes the weaknesses and limitations of the individual methods mentioned earlier by combining different methods. It not only provides Mobile AR applications with convincing precise and robust results but also reduces the computational complexity.
This hybrid scheme will play an important role in the promotion of Mobile AR on a large scale at present.
On another post, we’ll learn more about technologies which help in increasing the efficiency of AR experience on Mobile.
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https://medium.com/media/1e1f2ee7654748bb938735cbca6f0fd3/hrefWeb AR: Future of Mobile Augment Reality was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.