Augmented Reality (AR) – The Reality of the future

Fusing the real world with an idea you have created in your mind and turning it into reality can make you feel like God in a world of mortals……but only if done right.

Here are 7 important measures to consider before building your AR app:

1. Types of AR

Marker-Based

In a marker-based AR app,  the images are provided beforehand. In this case, you know, exactly, what the application should recognize, while obtaining the camera data, and should place the virtual objects on top of the recognized markers. Nowadays, most of the AR apps, dealing with image recognition, are marker-based. The simple reason is that it’s simpler to detect things that are pre-defined in your app. AR marker can be a straight forward black and white (square) image or can be a QR code, also. You can even create your own QR code for free using available tools online. These are easily recognized and tracked; system doesn’t need a lot of processing power to perform the recognition (and tracking).

Marker-Less

A marker-less AR application recognizes the real world objects that are not pre-defined within the application. This makes use of feature recognition. And, this scenario is more complex, because the augmented object scale and position need to be calculated using some mathematical (X, Y axes) logic.

At the end of the day, it is up to you, as a developer, which technique best suits your app as Marker-Based  can be more efficient in terms of processing and Marker-Less can help you achieve greater accuracy.

2. Reliable, Dynamic and Multiple Target Recognition

Reliability–  Target recognition depends on the size of the target, the clarity of the target image and the distance between the target and the camera. You should validate the ideal distance from which the image is getting recognized from the camera device. Because, in some cases, the image will be recognized only when we place the camera too close to it or the image may fluctuate when observing the composite AR view in device from a distance.

Dynamics–  AR SDKs must support/recognize dynamic markers where users add/change the markers, dynamically, from other end. In this fast moving world, we cannot always rely on some set of pre-loaded static images. So, AR vendors have to offer some system and API to get the images, dynamically, from the system.

Multiple– AR SDKs should support/recognize multiple marker images, at a time, and must present its unique augmented view, appropriate to each marker.

As a developer, you should ensure that these settings are optimized for your app to run efficiently.

3. Cloud Service Approach 

Give priority to service providers, who propose Cloud service and related API, to store/get marker images. As users we prefer when an app takes up the least amount of memory storage on our phones and so, a developer who can accommodate for that issue by choosing a cloud service approach will have his/her app met with greater responsiveness.

4. Platform Support

Choose AR service providers, offering SDKs, to native and cross platforms. Apart from these two, some service providers are offering SDKs for Xamarin, Apppcelarator, Unity, etc. Some service vendors provide native SDKs which involves only native language code, whereas, some other vendors expect HTML, JS, CSS code over and above the native language code.

5. Apparatus Support

Some AR SDKs support only mobile devices. And some service providers, also, support smart glasses, etc. and validate the SDKs supported image format. Some SDKs, only, support certain image format, which can be generated from common format, even by the service providers’ own creator tool from the official site. Likewise, different service providers suggest varied approach in image format areas. Ensure that your app is supported for its appropriate platforms and will run compatibily with others too.

6. Road-mapping 

Explore the sites of service providers and go through their future roadmap. Ask questions such as “What kind of support are they providing?”, “Are they expanding to new features or will they be releasing updates on new SDK features?” and “Is the service provider capable of conducting research in the AR field which can fuel innovation for the years to come?”.

7. Pricing

Most AR service providers offer trial version SDKs, to users, to explore the presenting features. In some SDKs, we should generate key/token, from their official site, after registration, to execute the sample tutorials. While using the trial version, you would get the logo of the providers enclosed.

Signing Off

While these are some important points to consider you should not disregard others such as Visual Live Search, Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) Technology, Face modeling and Tracking, as they are equally important. Hopefully this article has given you the guidance of how to approach the creation of an AR app and now you can easily get back to building your masterpiece!