Argon – Paper Summary
With a short discussion about Augmented Reality (AR) and previous work in the field the paper discusses about web based AR. One of the challenges for AR as a field is the hardware requirements. However, with the development of smart phones with hardware such as camera, GPS, orientation sensors, etc coupled with the ubiquity of mobile phones has made it an promising platform for AR. The paper further describes Argon, a browser based AR application for iPhone.
A high level architecture of Argon shows how it leverages existing web technologies to implement AR features on the phone environment. The language used is KARML which is an extension of Google’s KML. This coupled with AJAX on the client side and cloud based server side process aggregation helps in effective implementation of a not too resource intensive application. At the time of development only Apple’s iPhone had the browser capability to render 3D CSS. The application is partially native to iPhone. A native/interpreted bridge is used for communication between native and interpreted code. The content is presented using channels and each channel is implemented in a single WebKit instance. The elements on screen are placed using geo-locations. The accuracy of the geo-objects is limited by the capability of the phone’s GPS.
The remaining part of the paper describes some very interesting applications that I would like to see in action.
A web based AR system such as Argon is a very promising platform for content generation and representation. It’s integration with existing frameworks and services represents it’s capability to integrate many other web based services.
Comments are closed.