The Future of Augmented Reality: ARaaS

Why AR as a Service?

Initially, mobile AR was conceptualized as a SLAM algorithm to get it to work on a mobile phone. As long as you could map and track environments and add digital objects onto the real world, you were good to go.

Pokemon Go was a great example of an AR game which went viral. Even though it was context-based (via GPS), it might have been a success even without it.

But, that was just a starting point. Even though SLAM remains one of the main focal technologies of AR, it isn’t enough to write real world applications of value.

One of the major things missing with just SLAM algorithms is context. When AR moved from marker-based to markerless, it lost one important thing, context.

Context can be in many forms, some of which are:

a. Where you are, such as indoors, outdoors, in the kitchen?

b. What you are looking at (as compared to just detecting the surface).

c. The ability to tag things in the real world.

d. Awareness of who and what your co-workers are looking at for collaboration.

With the amount to data required to accomplish the above, AR apps necessitate information to be stored on the cloud and streamed from the cloud as needed.

Obviously, to facilitate that, an internet connection is needed, so it would then make sense to run the SLAM algorithm also on the cloud, and stream AR onto mobile devices.

While ARCore is being made available to many versions of mobile devices, a cloud-based platform would provide a universal mechanism to make AR available on all mobile devices, including those under $100 in cost.

Upcoming technologies like 5G will blur all latency and speed related issues to enable this, and startups and large companies will leverage that power to do real time AR/VR computation and to stream content.

Whodat, a portfolio company, is the first startup globally, to develop and launch a commercial ARaaS product. Their markerless AR SDK — Origin, will officially be launching at the Augmented World Expo 2018 in Santa Clara between May 28 — June 1.

This article was written by Suryaprakash Konanuru, CTO, Ideaspring Capital and Sriram Ganesh, Founder and CEO, Whodat.