Don’t get me wrong, I love technology and gadgets and anything that pushes the envelope of progress, however, as much as I love the advancement in technologies in ALL fields there will always be a part of me that fears the impact and effects it will have on our human race as a whole. Then again, if the human race is moving towards THIS .. then I am only too glad that I will not be around too long to see it.

Great blog and great efforts. Happy 3rd Day Birthday!

Cheers!
Carmen Villadar
@digitalfemme

Thanks for spotting the comments problem. I missed that switch in my haste to setup the blog. – comment now enabled.

Fully agree with the marker technology, it has its uses but not so many in the real world. No one is going to walking down the street hunting down markers to get access to rich information.

Full on board with markerless technologies. In the perfect world which was the solution I was discussing with my buddy, there wouldn’t be a whole bunch of applications on the phone each doing different things. So rather than having to load an app to give you the history of a particular building and yet another for locating the nearest ATM, you would get all this data by default when using the camera. My solution was around a plug-in model where if you happen to point at an ATM machine you are presented with a bunch of plug-ins which you can install that relate to ATMs. It would be up to the community to build these plug-ins and the user to decide which one they wanted to install. Some could be free, some could be sponsored, some you could buy etc.

What my buddy was countering with was who is the audience for this technology (well me and everyone on this board for one), but how do you educate your family, friends and consumers that they need this. What is the usecase and the consumers need for wanting to point at an ATM to begin with. As a thought provoking question, If you went outside now with your smartphone what would you want to know?

I’m 110% sold on it, but it was interesting having the conversation with someone who hadn’t heard of the technology as they helped me think more about the idea from a potential audience side.

Hi Lester
Comments on you blog are turned off (require password) , so I’ll post comment here.
The thing is, marker-based AR is suited only for games. Any non-entertainment app should use markerless tracking. Tat way you wouldn’t have to put up with problem how to teach user use markers. I have experience with marker based games – some user didn’t even understood that they have to use markers. They complained that they turned game on and nothing happen. Some other users didn’t have access to printer. And yet another didn’t understood that they have to point phone camera on the markers.
To teach users to use markerless could be easy, but it also depend on the algorithm. If you had followed my tweets you know I complain about narrow baseline a lot. That mean for reliable 3d registration, for obtaining 3d “scan” of the environment, however rough, the baseline – distance between physical places where the camera frame used for registration was taken – should be comparable with distance to scanned object. Complete 3d registration is not necessary for markerless tracking, but it definitely preferable.