Augmenting Reality-High on Qualcomm's List

Imagine this:

• Pointing your phone at a famous landmark and almost instantly receiving relevant historic or current information about your surroundings,
• Walking into a toy store and seeing a doll house come to life by merely pointing your smartphone at the outside of the package,
• Fixing a paper jam in a copy machine by pointing a device at the copier and, directed by the virtual arrows that appear, pressing in sequence the right buttons and levers,
• Visualizing what you'll look like in a wedding dress without actually trying it on.

This are the kind of possibilities that augmented reality (AR) promises in the near future, and Qualcomm, one of the largest chip makers in the world for mobile devices, is at the forefront of it. The San Diego based technology firm not only advocates and promotes this new-era application industry, but also designing and developing technologies and processors to enable mobile devices run the application. At present, according to the company, 60% of smartphones run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor which, besides other features, enables augmented reality applications run on those smartphones.

Mobile augmented reality comes in 2 forms-compass/GPS based, which is generally used for navigation; and vision based, which is the technique of using a phone's camera, processor, and display to recognize and augment what the camera sees. Now, a confluence of ever-improving technologies-cellphone cameras, more powerful processors, graphics chips, touch-screens, compasses, GPS and location based technologies are helping drive AR forward.

The Potential

A recent report from Juniper Research found that an increasing number of leading brands, retailers, and mobile vendors are investing in mobile AR applications and services. And the AR industry has the potential to touch $1.5 bn by 2015 from a meager $2 mn in 2010. The same report also mentions that the installed base of AR capable smartphones had increased from 8 mn in 2009 to more than 100 mn in 2010. “Enterprise apps with AR elements are expected to account for the third-largest proportion of revenues by 2015, after location based search and games,” forecasts the Juniper Research report.

Predictably, an advanced technology company like Qualcomm could sense the pulse of the industry and started investing heavily on this technology. The company has the biggest AR R&D unit in the world and the message from its recent Editor's Day event in San Diego, California was clear-it thinks that AR is going to play a significant role in shaping the mobile media horizon. “At present, it is among our top 3 focus areas in our R&D division,” Steve Mollenkopf, executive vice president and group president, Qualcomm, said to a 50-odd visiting journalists to its San Diego head quarter who attended the annual event.

Qualcomm's corporate research and development group is leading in the effort to create new tools, middleware, and promotions to enable mobile augmented reality. Recently, the company announced the Qualcomm AR Developer Challenge to encourage developers to create effective, entertaining and functional AR apps, and awarded a total of $200,000 to top 3 AR developers.

But how does the Paul Jacobs led firm make money from AR? “We hope to advance our chipset business by creating a surprising and useful interface technology which is then made available to application developers and OS providers,” says Jay Wright, senior director, business development, Qualcomm. “By making it easy for software developers to augment the real world with 3D content through the SDK and Unity3D module, we expect to see interesting new uses for this technology and for the Qualcomm hardware operating underneath,” he adds further.

Challenges

Though the picture looks rosy, the success of AR is by no means a slam dunk. The smartphones, at present, lack standardized options for live video input from peripheral cameras. Besides, there is no USB host support even when the phone's hardware is ready for it, resulting in USB webcams unusable. Most importantly, mobile AR with smartphones is currently highly inconvenient as it is not hands-free and at times, one needs to use both hands for stability. Mobile AR has the potential to explode, but there are issues that Qualcomm has to look at before the technology becomes a reality, though augmented but not a virtual one.

Gyana Ranjan Swain

The author was hosted at

San Diego by Qualcomm

gyanas@cybermedia.co.in