NETWORK STRATEGIES
Headline
MobiAR: an augmented reality test case
MobiAR is a project consortium led by Telefónica I+D with the collaboration of Indra, Brainstorm, Fomento de San Sebastián and LabHuman Vicomtech-IK4. The objective of MobiAR was the development of a tourist information service platform based on mobile augmented reality and using existing smartphones. Users of the service are able to display rich information about what they are seeing, superimposing virtual information on “real world” elements. MobiAR is an Android service platform that handles location-based information and user
preferences and takes advantages of computer vision technologies to determine user interests. The user points the mobile camera in any direction and observes the “reality” captured by the camera superimposed with certain points of interest. Users then select a point of interest by touching the screen, and a number of available multimedia elements are then immediately displayed on the screen, such as description, comments, images and video.
User evaluation of MobiAR was carried out over three days during November 2010 in San Sebastián, Spain, with the collaboration of the city council. Around 25 points of interest were generated in the La Concha Bay, Old Town, City and Boulevard. Each point of interest that appeared on the screen was associated with multimedia content such as photos, videos, texts or three-dimensional reconstructions, and it was also possible to obtain historical photos of the city.
The number of points of interest is set to increase in future as shop owners also add their data to the system.
The MobiAR platform was also trialled in Valencia over one day in order to test multilingual capabilities and interaction with 3D content. Around 15 points of interest were selected in the Spanish city.
There is potentially a bigger end game for mobile operators if they act quickly enough
service “Ici Info” in November 2009, which features more than 900,000 unique points of interest (POI). And Japan’s NTT DoCoMo provides the intuitive naviga- tion service “chokkan nabi” to its subscribers. Telefónica I+D, meanwhile, has devel-
oped and patented proprietary visual recognition technology that forms the basis of IRIS, a visual search service that it is now licensing on a commercial basis to third parties including Layar, BuzzAR and Metaio. The AR software developers are implementing IRIS into their brows- ers to enable users to discover relevant augmented reality content more easily. “Telefonica was in a position to partner
to provide its IP in a commercial rela- tionship in 2010,” says Marimon, who is heading up the operator’s AR developments. IRIS employs image recognition tech-
nology and thereby reduces AR’s reliance on GPS technology for the provision of object-relevant data. IRIS provides infor- mation related to an object by taking a picture of it; this also means that the
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object needs no special packaging, tag or marker. Telefónica I+D has also brought its
visual recognition technology into the Spanish MobiAR project, which is a government-funded collaboration among a number of players to trial AR services in the tourism sector (see box). The tech- nology is used to enable the recognition of buildings by using existing image data- bases such as Google to correct the information provided by GPS, thereby
A different angle
A new solution that aims to help operators manage their networks using augmented reality highlights a further interesting use of mobile AR: user guides. In September SunVizion unveiled its AR-based telco Network Inventory that allows its users to capture, store and manage all key data about their network infrastructure, confi guration, status and performance. The solution can also be employed to enable fi eld workers to locate all the objects they are to work on with all necessary information about them using a mobile phone.
enabling users to access information rele- vant to buildings of interest. Analysts welcome the move by
Telefonica and its strategic partnerships with AR browser companies as a key development for mobile AR. “When AR started it was based on GPS, which can be really imprecise,” says Cartier. “This proved to be a dampener on user experi- ence…image recognition technology is a very important piece of AR.” Marimon says Telefónica views AR as
an intuitive way to deliver contextual services, and this is what the company has been focusing on in its research. However, Telefónica provides no direct
AR-based services to customers as yet and, according to Marimon, turning MobiAR into a commercial product is not currently on the roadmap – largely due to the issues surrounding high data roaming charges that would preclude the use of the service by foreign tourists. “The project was mainly research,” Marimon says, “and it has helped to identify weak- nesses,” although he declined to specify what they were. Marimon was also unable to provide
any further information at present about Telefonica’s future AR development plans. “We cannot talk about future plans…but it’s broader than visual search,” he says. Both Marimon and Beccue of ABI
Research take the view that there is potentially an even bigger end-game for mobile operators with AR, if they act quickly enough and get ahead of the over- the-top players such as Google. “As the technology becomes more advanced, operators could play a role in the realisa- tion of the ‘Internet of things’,” says Beccue. The basic idea of the Internet of things
is that every single object has data attached to it; Beccue says telcos could be the logical players to realise this by index- ing objects, thereby creating a catalogue and a search engine. The other clear role that operators would have is to provide the communication between objects and devices. “Someone has to do all that, and mobile operators could be the ones,” he says. n
www.totaltele.com December 2011/January 2012
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