Augmented reality may no longer be the science fiction concept it was even just a few years ago – the Financial Times tried its hands at using augmented reality for one of its features last year – but it is certainly still a long way from being a part of everyday life.
That will all change within the next five years, according to Hon Hsiao-Wuen, managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, the company’s Beijing-based fundamental research lab. “My prediction is that in five years any object you meet in the real world that matters to you, you can go onto the cloud to find more information about,” Mr Hon said.
Part of what will change over the next five years to make this possible is better technology. “There’s all sorts of sensors out there right now” from face recognition and voice-recognition software to GPS, Mr Hon said, but “we can only show demos now, which is why this will take five years . . . the technology needs to be more robust.”
However, equally important will be pioneering viable business models that make it worthwhile for people to index, organise and upload all the data. Augmented reality will likely begin with movies, tourism and restaurants – places where the commercial incentives for using augmented reality are relatively apparent.
This will be followed by the long tail of niche enthusiasts filling in the gap for their various communities, although even then, “there will always be gaps” where no information is indexed to an object, he says.
Mr Hon and his team are working with the National Palace Museums in both Taipei and Beijing on applying some of this augmented reality technology to their exhibitions, the most important of which is the famed Chinese painting “Along the River During the Qingming Festival”, which depicts life in a Song dynasty Chinese city.
Using a giga-pixel camera, Microsoft has scanned the 5.28m long picture to create a digital model for museum-goers. Every aspect of the painting, including its 814 humans and 60 animals, are digitally annotated with explanations or audio recreations. The cool trick is how those annotations are integrated into the digital model: zoom in to a few people having crowd gathering around an argument and you can hear the individual voices, but zoom out and it fades into ambient noise. Mr Hon’s team are now working on animating all the characters in the painting.
Yet Microsoft Research’s efforts in creating and integrating this extra layer of information onto the painting shows just how hard and time-consuming it can be to create useful and entertaining data to map onto real world objects. If augmented reality really is to become popularised in five year’s time, a lot of people still have a lot of work to do.
