philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Who is seeding the AR Cloud

Technologically speaking, enabling spatial computing needs a Universal Visual Browser (UVB) that can detect the world around it with hyper-precision, and filter contextually relevant data to be displayed to the user based on location, activity, or time of day. The UVB will interface with everything we own, everyone we know, and everywhere we go.

The big dog of computer vision is Amazon Web Services (AWS) which offers Amazon Rekognition (sic) – "Image Detection and Recognition Powered by Deep Learning."

In November 2017, AWS introduced Rekognition Video, which extracts even more data, correctly identifying the activity, direction, and intention of people and objects, making the system capable to tracking subjects that are obscured.

"Blippar is where AR and AI meet," says Tayeb. "It's not enough to identify a woman and a stroller. A universal visual browser will also understand the relationship. The stroller could have a baby inside it and the woman is possibly the mother. It's not just visual, it's contextual. That's what makes Blippar unique."

Toronto based startup Vertical.ai, a 2015 Y- Combinator graduate which has raised 2M to use computer vision and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) to build an AR Cloud, just announced the launch of Placenote. an app that allows mobile developers to build AR apps that permanently place virtual objects in the real world for others to discover. If Blippar works at the city scale, Placenote works best at the room scale.

“One of the big things holding back engaging AR is for content to feel like it’s actually physically part of the world,” 6D.ai CEO Matt Miesnieks told TechCrunch in an interview.

Miesnieks describes 6D.ai as "Waze for AR". The app would take all those rooms, all those locations, all those cities, and stitch together buildings, objects, landmarks and other camera data to create a world map, both inside and outside the home, school, office, or wherever the app is used. In addition to the providing developers the 3D structure of the world without needing depth cameras, 6D.ai will semantically identify 3D objects to enable intelligent AR applications. Miesnieks told me in an email 6D.ai will have significant company news within the next four weeks. The company first garnered attention when Tim Cook visited Oxford in 2017 and expressly asked to see Prisacariu's project.

Dent Reality of London is announcing a family of developer tools to make it simple to create AR location experiences, beginning with "Point Of Interest" experiences.The toolkit uses Computer Vision to identify the surrounding landscape, and then precisely overlays digital content.

Charlie Fink is a former Disney & AOL exec and Forbes columnist. In the 90s, he ran VR pioneer Virtual World. He's the author of Charlie Fink's Metaverse, An AR Enabled Guide to VR & AR.

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2018/03/01/who-is-seeding-the-ar-cloud/#50055e7f5ae2