Turning Augmented Reality into an Open Standard

This will be big for the future. [Link]

A research team at Georgia Tech hopes to make augmented reality (AR) on smart phones more useful by developing an open standard for it.

Currently, there is no standard way to create or render AR applications, which overlay information on the live video feed from a phone's camera. Companies such as Layar help app developers create AR functions, but they use proprietary technologies. That means, among other things, that different AR apps may be unable to talk to each other or share data. The Georgia Tech team hopes that its open standard, an enhancement of existing Web protocols, will yield a common way for every Web browser to store, transmit, and manipulate data for augmented reality services. If it does, you wouldn't need a separate app for each AR function on your phone—one browser could show them all.

"We're the only people who are trying to piggyback intimately on top of Web architecture," says Blair Macintyre, director of the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech. The standard developed by his group is known as KML/HTML Augmented Reality Mobile Architecture, or KHARMA. It combines the Keyhole Markup Language (KML) used by the Google Earth mapping program with existing HTML and a handful of other protocols invented by Macintyre's team. The group also has built a reference browser—a sample of the technology in action—called Argon.

KHARMA is an evolution of the Web, rather than a wholesale invention of standards specifically designed for augmented reality. In contrast, almost all previous attempts to create a standard platform for augmented reality either in academia or commercially have been proprietary or purpose-built. This difference, argues Macintyre, could be the key to Argon and KHARMA's success. Argon is not yet open-source, but once it's stabilized, Macintyre's team will release the code base.