CREATE AN AUGMENTED REALITY EXPERIENCE

What is Augmented Reality?

Augmented-reality (AR) adds digital content onto the physical world (as seen from a live camera feed), making the digital content look as if it is part of the physical world around you. That is, augmented-reality creates an illusion where the user is made to experience (virtual) things that are not really present in the physical world. For e.g., augmented-reality can add a horn, moustache, or beard to your face, make an avatar or physical object appear in front of you, make your face look like a cat or a dog, overlay navigational directions onto the roads around you, see how a bed-spread sheet looks on your bed, how a sofa-set looks in your living room, etc.

Unlike virtual-reality experience which is totally immersive and blocks the outside world, in augmented-reality, the user experiences virtual objects "augmented" or "super-imposed" on his/her real-world physical environment. So, AR combines both virtual-world and real-world objects into one unifying experience for the user.

Augmented-reality has become very popular these days through mobile games. "Pokémon Go" is one such popular augmented-reality app that makes users see and catch virtual Pokémon characters moving around in their physical environment.

How can I experience Augmented Reality?

Augmented-reality can be experienced using a computer, smartphone, tablet, AR head-mounted display (HMD), AR glass or AR lens. The head-mounted display allows viewers to visualize virtual objects super-imposed onto the real environment. An augmented-reality software captures a part of the real-world environment using a camera on a smartphone, tablet, or head-mounted display. It then scans the captured piece of the environment to identify a point where to overlay additional information using markers or trackers like infrared, laser, GPS, or sensors.

When compared to the AR experience visualized within a tiny smartphone or a tablet screen, AR head-mounted displays, AR smart lens and AR smart glass offer a richer user experience.

How does Augmented Reality technology really work?

To know how AR actually works requires an understanding of the physical world from the camera feed, i.e. the AR system must understand what is in the physical world before adding relevant digital content at the right place. This is achieved using computer vision. First, computer vision understands what is in the physical world around the user from the content of the camera feed. This allows it to show digital content relevant to what the user is looking at. This digital content is then displayed in a realistic way, so that it looks as part of the real world. Since augmented reality is live, all the above has to happen every time a new frame comes from the camera. Most modern phones work at 30 frames per second, which gives us only 30 milliseconds to do all this. In many cases the AR feed you see through the camera is delayed by roughly 50 ms to allow all this to happen, but our brain does not notice!

To understand more about how AR works, please check out these links:

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How can I create an Augmented Reality experience?

You can use ZapWorks Designer, a simple and easy-to-use Augmented Reality (AR) software for digital designers and developers. It's a comprehensive platform that allows users to create any kind of interactive and immersive Augmented Reality (AR) experience on handheld devices. Using ZapWorks Designer’s easy-to-use drag and drop interface, one can quickly build multi-scene AR experiences using video, images, audio, buttons, links and more. Take a look at the below video to see the kind of AR experiences you can create with ZapWorks software.