AR – The Future Tech

Augmented reality (AR) is the coordination of digital information with live video and the user’s condition in real time. devices utilized for Augmented Reality are generally those of a computer, camera, processor and screen.

Reasons why Augmented Reality will be a future battleground

• Recent Launch of Apple AR Kit
• Social Media Platforms Incorporating Augmented Reality
• It will change the future of marketing
• Increasing number of users embracing Augmented Reality
• Various mobile Apps Utilizing AR

The most prominent example is in the healthcare industry. You can find more and more professionals engage with augmented reality to leverage their day to day task. 

• A doctor is able to view a patient’s medical history displayed over the latest medical scan, and even over the patient himself.
• Healthcare practitioners are now able to project medical imagery on to patient’s bodies using head mounted displays. Projecting CT scans though the display can give doctors “X-ray vision” of patients and provide important contextual cues for diagnosing patients.
• Patients are educated through simulation about their medical conditions (Cataract or AMD) using apps like Eye Decide.
• Patients get reminders on taking drugs by wearing Google Glass and having an app installed on the device.
• A nurse views a perfect highlighted image of the patient’s veins so the IV can be inserted in one painless attempt.

Some more facts and figures that prove that AR is the next big thing in tech are:

• The dedicated augmented reality market is expected to reach $659.98 million by the end of 2018
• According to Digi-Capital, AR/VR could hit $150 billion in revenue by 2020, with VR taking around $30 billion and AR $120 billion
• By the end of 2017, the sales of augmented reality smart glasses is expected to be worth $1.2 billion
• According to ISACA, 60% to 70% of consumers see clear benefits in using AR and IoT devices in their daily life at work.
• According to Forrester Research, 14.4 million U.S. enterprise workers expected to utilize smart glasses by 2025.
• According to Gartner, smart glasses will save nearly $1 billion per year in the field-service industry.

AR is not limited to a particular sphere as well. It can be utilized across all spheres of the market for branding & marketing purposes. 

1.Construction, engineering and architecture – A holographic representation provides an unmatched level of real-world proportion, scale, form, and perspective compared to traditional ways of building models.

2.Product configurator –The AR/MR apps are useful to product designers because they result in faster prototyping and 3D model visualization.

3. Healthcare – With AR headsets, doctors and dentists can show their patients a 3D view of the organ or section of the mouth that they are going to operate on.
4. Education – The main advantage is that 3D images and simulations can be created for students of all age groups. It is ideal for STEM education.
5. Augmented field service – Companies can equip their field technicians with AR headsets and ensure that experienced engineers are present to guide technicians working in remote locations.
6. Engaging advertising – Brands can incorporate AR elements in their advertisements and offer coupons to drive customer footfall into the store.
7. Events – Event organizers and exhibitors are turning to Augmented Reality to increase interactivity at their events which helps in attracting visitors.
8. Product demonstrations – Augmented Reality apps can give your potential customers an accurate view about the product. Furniture stores, home decorators, fashion stores are ideally suited to take advantage of this technology.
9. Interactive Websites – Websites which use Augmented Reality have seen a decrease in the bounce rate by their visitors. The result is that sales conversions, downloads and even total page visits increase.
10. AR-enhanced tours – A tourist walking down a historic place can be given information on his mobile phone which has been overlaid with the real world images.

Augmented reality along with virtual reality is changing the world on a daily basis. The applications are unlimited and the possibilities are limited by our imagination only.

Building An AR App

The world of mobile technology has seen tremendous upgrades since the last few months and it would not be odd to say it’s changing week by week. As most of the businesses today are linked with technology, it’s prudent to stay up to date with it. Augmented reality is one such technology that is gaining tremendous traction and experts believe the technology is here to stay.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology which allows overlaying of digital data on top of real world items or objects. As AR integrates digital information with real-time live feeds, it has plenty of opportunities for businesses to engage with customers and improve their revenues. Fashion, Retail, and Travel were the three original trendsetters who initially started to use AR in their businesses. Now they are taking it a notch up and implementing it on a large scale.

Various types of Augmented Reality Apps

Marker based AR Apps

You must have identified, searched or installed something using QR code. If so, then that technology is enabled using Marker-based Augmented Reality. A device like Smartphone or any other device having a camera can be used to see virtual superimposed on real life objects. Animated and 3D images can also be seen with the help of AR technology.

Location-based AR Apps

The GPS of each mobile device helps to provide the accurate location of the user. Location based AR apps use this feature of a mobile app to send personalized deals and offers to a consumer.

Some things to know before developing an AR-based app

1) Imagery

A user-friendly Imagery should be the primary consideration while developing an AR-based consumer app. It should not be over the top but be realistic and easy on the eye.

2) Programming Languages

The programming languages of choice to create AR based apps for businesses are C# and C++. Also, some other skills which are essential for the successful creation of the app are practical knowledge of 3D modeling and Imaging.

3) Factors to consider

• Finalizing the use case and appropriately selecting the SDK’s suitable for the business requirements.
• Create the target objects and take use of the cloud recognition technology if required.
• SDK selection is of critical importance for the success of the project. The important and commonly used SDK features are Reliable Target Recognition, Multiple Targets Recognition, and Dynamic Target Recognition.

Prospects of Augmented Reality

There is tremendous scope for AR in the future in not just fashion and retail but across multiple industries of the business spectrum. Education is one such field where it can be a Game changer. Also it can be very useful while learning a new language as can be seen from some popular apps which have been downloaded million of times.

For a developer building a new app for AR can be highly rewarding but for a business’s it can bring multiple benefits in terms of revenue gains and enhanced user engagement.

Augmented Reality Applications

The phenomenal success of Pokemon Go showed the world the limitless possibilities of Augmented Reality in the field of entertainment and gaming. However not many are aware of the possibilities Augmented Reality opens up in the field of medicine and healthcare.

Today, we take a look at the ways in which AR can influence the realm of healthcare.

1 – Telementoring

This application of AR vastly expands the range and expertise of the physician working on a complex procedure. Suppose if a given operation requires deeply expert ands of a specialist but he/ she is not available on the hospital premises (or may be present in an altogether different geography), AR can come in handy.

With AR, a medical professional can become actively involved in an on-going procedure. This is achieved by virtually superimposing his/ her hand using Google Glasses for showing the right way to do a detailed task during the operation.

2 – Vision aid

Most of the legally blind people have a little bit of vision left in them. However this is not sufficient to do daily tasks like recognizing faces or reading or evading obstacles in their path. The startup VA-ST helps them to recreate some sense of vision using Augmented Reality. This will create a rough outline of a face (somewhat like a stenciled sketch). This will enhance the level of vision available to the user in poorly lit areas and those with lower level of visibility can figure out an object or a person in front him or her, to a better degree.

3 – Nursing aid

Nurses often find it difficult to find a vein on the patient’s vein to draw blood or inject drugs. While many can do so precisely, there are other who need 2-3 attempts before they are able to locate a vein. Accuvein is integrating Augmented Reality into its handheld scanner that makes this task quicker and more efficient. Using this scanner, nurses can easily locate the patient’s vein. The device has been tested on almost 10 million patients and the outcome has been exceptional. The device has proved to be 3.5x more likely to locate a patient’s vein on the first go itself.

4 – Better drug knowledge

Patients can get step by step dosage, mode of action, and its benefits simply by scanning across a bottle of the medicine. Users have the option to scan both the packaging as well as the printed text stuck on the bottle to uncover richer information about a particular drug’s benefit and probable side effects.

5 – Medicinal study

None of the fields within healthcare has seen the phenomenal benefits of AR as it is with the medicinal education field. Examples will be ARnatomy that uses OCR in its app to match a specific word like cranium and flash important details with visuals and information.

These are the different ways in which AR can interact with healthcare IT and create an immersive 3d world for precision based medical science education and procedures carried out by medical professionals.

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!

Facebook Engineers Pull The Plug On AI Bots

As the world’s most powerful computer systems begin to embrace artificial intelligence in earnest, using smart algorithms to increase efficiency and and speed, the potential damage that a “rogue” AI could cause continues to grow. Many in the tech community have theorized how an artificial mind could turn against its creators, and Facebook just got an interesting lesson in how such a scenario might unfold. Facebook engineers were forced to pull the plug on one of the company’s AI systems after its bots began communicating with each other in a completely new language which humans simply couldn’t decipher.

Facebook developers were attempting to get the two “chatbots” to barter a trade with one another utilizing hats, balls, and books of varying values, according to the Independent. The two bots quickly resorted to speaking a variation of English between one another that seemed largely incomprehensible to the developers but was seemingly understood clearly by the two bots.

The AI bots, which were originally programmed to use plain English to communicate with one another, were found to be speaking what appeared to be gibberish. Sentences like “I can can I I everything else” and “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to,” were being sent back and forth by the AI, and while humans have absolutely no idea what it means, the bots fully understood each other. Without being able to understand how or why the bots were communicating, Facebook had no choice but to shut down the system.

The very obvious danger here is that computer which can communicate with each other using their own language are not only impossible to understand but much more difficult to control. In this case, the bots were not bound by plain language and seemingly developed a more efficient way of communicating with each other, deciding for themselves what was best.

It’s both impressive and scary.

How Will AR transform the future?

We are constantly updating our technology to make our lives simpler and our jobs free of unwanted hassles. Augmented Reality is one such technological advancement that has already started to make a buzz in the industry with its varied applications. Its uses seem to be limited to our imagination. It can be anywhere and anytime. It is all set to change our future as we speak.