Augmented reality has the potential to change how people interact and experience their surrounding environment.
By combining the technology with the mobility and computing power of smartphones, augmented reality will impact almost every industry, particularly retail, entertainment, travel and advertising.
In a recently published report, London-based research firm ARCchart forecasts that revenues generated from mobile phone augmented reality applications will reach $2.2 billion by 2015.
Augmented reality is the experience created when content from the virtual world is overlaid on top of the live video feed of the surrounding environment, captured by the phone's camera.
The technology leverages the handset's location and inertia sensors (GPS, compass, accelerometer etc.) to determine the device's position and marries this with virtual content supplied by backend information servers in conjunction with search, advertising and image recognition engines.
However, there is a word of caution. Before full augmented reality can be achieved, some big technical hurdles must be overcome.
“The availability of standardized visual content will be a significant hurdle in providing robust AR experiences” explains Peter Crocker, the report's lead analyst.
“Computer vision, which involves object recognition and the accurate anchoring of content, must also be improved to support real time processing.”