technotecture

Ok, I might sound like a nitpicker - if you don't like research based argumentation and like the loud noise of the marketeer, please move on. My take: Layar has as much in common with AR as Wikitude and whatever LBS you can augment. And the Wikipedia article on Augmented Reality (no I am not linking it here because its just wrong) is written by a bunch of PR monkeys.

Lets look at the definition for Augmented Reality by Ron Atsuma one of the pioneers in this field and he provided this long standing three main characteristics:

• combines real and virtual (tick)
• is interactive in real-time (a thin tick)
• is registered in three dimensions (no tick - fail)

So, why I am nitpicking here. As LBS goes we only have a horrible update rate in the tracking data, GPS is slow, accelerometers drift etc. pp, the vision based part is more or less non existing plus it seems video capture on Android is slow. Thats why I would argue a no-tick here, but its down to technology which can be improved, so lets say half a tick here. Registered in three dimensions - this is a completely different beast. Here it fails because of concept not of technology. Unless the video on YouTube is badly rendered I can't see a three-dimensional registration. There is some depth cue added on the blobs size but well, no occlusion, no proper locking between the real and virtual environment. Registration in 3D means at least full 3DOF for the translation, however, I would argue 6DOF is necessary to speak of something like registration.

Sorry, its a really neat application but its just not augmented reality, and btw. its also not the first AR browser. IMHO these are Mixed Reality Aided LSB - full stop. Now, over to the marketing monkeys again.