Week 3 Summary : Argon
The Argon AR Web Browser and Standards-based AR Application Environment
Argon is the world’s first Augmented Reality web-browser which contains a lot of information, superimposed on the view around. The highlights of Argon include multiple channels which are independent of each other yet flexible to design and integrate with ever-growing cloud of systems around us.
The three main goals in Argon’s development include creating an AR application environment, build on existing mobile technology as much as possible and allowing easy authoring of applications. Argon extends the semantics of KML and HTML in its overall architecture . One main feature of Argon is the ability to use panoramic images in the background instead of live video.
Argon allows users to leverage the power of the latest in web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and KML and design and deliver the content the way they want. Powerful mobile phones with GPS and orientation sensors have made handheld sensor-based video see through augmented reality practical for commercial applications. The AR application is in the form of channels on the web server which can be viewed simultaneously. These channels are independent and can be customized according to the needs and interface as required by the user.
Even though Argon has a lot of advantages there are certain limitations which need to be addressed in the future versions. Currently the latitude and longitudes are absolute references to degree coordinates, also the accuracy of the current GPS system is not perfectly accurate.
The highlight of Argon includes the presence of 4 webservice-based AR searches in the form of TwitterSearch, FlickrSearch, GoogleLocalSearch and iReportSearch. In the future it would be interesting to know how new features like 3D model rendering, support for desktop and non-ios devices can be incorporated.
Even though I love this idea of augmented reality one question that keeps popping up is that with so much information around will over-reliance on augmented reality in the future mean that people will miss out on what’s right in front of them? I hope not.
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