We want to make things easy for you. If you understand the AR world better, you’ll be able to speak the experts’ language, create unique proposals, and million-dollar ideas will come to your mind.
Augmented Reality
To begin, let’s briefly explain what Augmented Reality is. AR is something new that’s being ‘added’ to your reality, something you can see through your phone’s screen, but it’s not actually there. It can be a 3D model, a video, text, or an image; this new ‘layer’ that you’re seeing can be called AR content, AR layer, or AR overlay. This AR layer can be interactive, meaning it can move or be animated with or without the user's input. If you want more details and examples, you can find them here.
AR Apps and WebAR
AR content could be visible through an App or by opening a link on your web browser. Apps like Snapchat or Instagram have some AR content. Still, if you want to develop an app from scratch or integrate AR into your existing app, you’ll need something called SDK (software development kit), which is the software that enables the development. There are many of them, but you have to consider a million things to decide which one could be the best option for your project since they approach functionalities in many different ways depending on the operating systems (iOS, Android). Also, AR apps need the user to go through the app stores to download them. The process of introducing an app in these stores is quite long. It usually takes weeks to have the approval, and you have to pay a fee. Another disadvantage of apps is managing updates because users have to download the latest version of the app, and it’s usually problematic.
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Luckily WebAR exists, which is a way to have AR experiences without having an App. The AR experience starts by clicking on a link or pointing your camera at a QR code; then, the camera will be enabled in the browser to enjoy the AR content there, making it easily available on any device with any operating system. The following infographic shows the differences between WebAR and app-based AR throughout the user’s journey.
Recognition / Tracking / Anchor Images
Now you’ll be looking at the AR content through your phone’s camera, which will ‘look’ and ‘recognize’ the surroundings to understand where to place the AR layer. This process is called recognition and tracking. The software already has a reference of what to look for; for example, it can be an image in a printed magazine, an object like a vacuum cleaner, or simply faces. This reference is called an anchor, a marker, or a target.
When the camera sensors recognize the anchor, the tracking will follow its position and orientation. This is what enables AR content to seem like it’s a part of the real world.
Markerless AR
There is another type of AR technology that allows starting the AR content without specific anchors. This way, the AR content can be shown as floating in the air with instant tracking or plain tracking technology. Also, they can be placed concerning the nearest surface if it is done using SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) technology, which identifies the different points in the environment to create a map of it.
Also, when AR content is displayed using markerless tracking, the content can be triggered using GPS location or Visual Positioning Service (VPS), which creates a map by analyzing multiple images and comparing them to those in the VPS central database. Pokemon Go uses this technology, as well as Google for the AR feature of Maps.
Frame and Interface
With both App or WebAR, users will experience the AR layer through the camera, so the screen will be the frame or field of view for this type of content. Then, the interface is the space in the screen in which the user will interact with the non-AR content during the AR experience, like buttons, text, a logo, etc. that the user should be able to see, but that doesn’t relate to any anchor or surface of the surroundings.
Now you know more about AR, but please feel free to book a demo of our platform here if it’s still confusing. Our team would be more than happy to help you navigate the AR jungle.
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Everything you need to know about Augmented Reality (AR) jargon 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.
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