GPS-Based Augmented Reality

October 8, 2009 By: Stephen Colwell

Coming Soon to a Dimension Near You

The world as we know it is about to change once again for personal navigation devices.

Mobile Augmented Reality overlays your location with a multitude of real-world data. Your smartphone camera sees the real world that you see. Overlays identify what you are looking at or pointing to and provides a host of possible information such as identifying restaurants, shops, historical landmarks, public transportation gateways, and various points of interest. All this delivered to your screen. You control the amount of content and can specify different views, if you want to see what’s around you from different perspectives, from standing on the street up or standing on a roof of a building. Each identified object will provide the user with additional levels of information such as a picture, address, and phone number of a restaurant, its menu, its interior, user comments, and their website. For travelers these new devices are really useful, as you can walk through a historic district of a city, point towards a building, and see its history as you’re looking at it.

Smartphones are taking market share from standalone personal navigation devices (PNDs). Consumers are finding the average cost of a PND to be between $100 and $300 dollars. Smartphones with a year or two service contract are averaging (nationwide) an estimated $177, which includes the phone media browser and another host of features that PNDs just do not have. In this economy, consumers are looking for efficient money-saving ways to manage their needs at a lower cost.

Augmented reality programs and smartphones are a perfect match to attract consumers and enterprise users and will capture the hearts of many users as the bugs get slowly worked out.

The smartphone industry is experiencing an explosion of new opportunities as well as suffering headaches as the age-old compatibility problem plagues the developers’ community. With no standard in place developers target the applications for one or several smartphone operating systems, leaving the other OS sytems to wait. Operating systems that can be found on smartphones include Symbian OS, iPhone OS, RIM's BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Linux, Palm WebOS, and Android. Android and WebOS are in turn built on top of Linux, and the iPhone OS is derived from the BSD and NeXTSTEP operating systems, which all are related to Unix.

The Crying Need for Interoperability

According to a recent press release from Mobilizy, one of the one the largest augmented reality (AR) players: “Mobilizy, an Austrian concern and creator of Wickitude World, announced it would be presenting a standard (ARML) to the AR consortium. Cross-platform, open-development standards would allow users more ways to see more AR content.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb adds, "Right now you cannot see information from the Wikitude AR environment if you're looking through the Layar AR browser. This could be the coming of a new browser war just like that of the 1990s... A lack of interoperability between AR environments would be a tragedy of the same type as if the web had remained defined by the islands of AOL and Compuserve or Internet Explorer, forever."

The Business Case for AR

Venture capital is awash in recent funding for AR players and their applications. Like a wolf smelling a potential dinner, investors have begun to form packs and circle the potential start-ups and the possible returns. The driving of multi-scale applications from consumer to enterprise customers is too good to ignore. AR for use in navigation and non-navigation is fueling the developers and platform manufacturers forward at a fast pace. The following chart is courtesy of Personal Media and Gary Hines.

The business case differs in each scenario and is driven by different levels of profitability. Although GPS and AR may be in the mid- to low-end of the AR food chain, the sheer volume of potential users make up for any pricing discounts. Increased sales of smartphones, usage charges, and application sales downplay any other shortfalls.

The Players

The Future Unfolding

GPS and augmented reality are going to cause a large ripple in the business plans of major GPS device manufacturers, primarily consumer PND markets. A shadow of smartphones versus standalone PNDs has been evident for some time, and it now seems the winds of change are in the air.

Garmin’s attempt at the Nuviphone utilizing the Android operating system has fallen way short of its mark. Although the other GPS manufacturers have not, as of yet, announced or delivered product to thwart the coming crisis they all face the same issues of design approval and certification, which takes years. The future is always unpredictable and all must face it or try to change it, after the fact.