R esearch Papers Open Augmented Reality Standards: Current Activities in Standards-Development Organizations Christine Perey
Open Augmented Reality Standards: Current Activities in StandardsDevelopment Organizations Christine Perey (PEREY Research & Consulting, Route de Chernex 2B, 1820 Montreux, Switzerland)
Abstract Augmented reality (AR) has emerged from research laboratories and is now being accepted in other domains as an attractive way of visualizing information. Before AR can be used in the mass market, there are a number of obstacles that need to be overcome. Several of these can be overcome by adopting open standards. A global grassroots community seeking open, interoperable AR content and experiences began to take shape in early 2010. This community is working collaboratively to reduce the barriers to the flow of data from content provider to AR end user. Standards development organizations and industry groups that provide open interfaces for AR meet regularly to provide updates, identify complementary work, and seek harmonization. The community also identifies deployer and implementer needs, communicates requirements, and discusses emerging challenges that could be resolved with standards. In this article, we describe current activities in international standards-development organizations. We summarize the AR standards gap analysis and shed light on special considerations for using standards in mobile AR. Keywords augmented reality, standards, open interfaces, AR reference model
1 Introduction
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ince late 2008, augmented reality (AR) has rapidly gone from being a topic of research and pilot projects to being a promising new way of providing value to almost any user scenario that involves the physical world and digital data. By providing digital information in real time and in tight association with the user’ s physical surroundings, AR enhances the experience of“the present”for pleasure, learning, and professional goals. As technologies mature and solutions for producing and experiencing the world with AR proliferate, companies must
work harder to define and protect their unique contributions to the AR ecosystem. In most markets, standards emerge once a sufficient number of organizations see market and business value in interoperating with the solutions or services of others. Standards frequently provide a shared platform for technology and market development. They ensure the smooth running of an ecosystem, in which different segments contribute to and benefit from the success of the whole, and they are commonly the basis for robust, economically viable value chains. Widespread adoption of standards throughout the AR ecosystem will ensure interoperability between traditional and emerging content-creation and management systems. It will also increase the variety and amount of data available for use in AR-enhanced end-user experiences. At the time of writing of this article, interoperable, open-standards-based AR content creation and management platforms do not exist. Applications for experiencing AR using standards-compliant interfaces and protocols also do not exist. This is not to say that there has been no change in the AR ecosystem over the past year or that there has been a lack of progress towards open-standards-based AR experiences. Over the past year, the number of single-vendor technology“silos”(technology that is closed and managed by a single vendor) has increased, and the challenge of publishing once for use across fragmented markets has grown more complex. At the same time, an increasing number of important industry groups and standards-development organizations (SDOs) have begun working on new, open frameworks and extensions of existing standards in which AR is the primary use case or one of the most important use cases. Finally, the number of users with AR-compatible devices has also increased, making the need for standards more clearly to participants in the ecosystem who seek to reach the mass market. In 2012, there has been widespread interest in and increasing requests for standards-compliant AR solutions. Content publishers that can provide high-value AR experiences are motivated to make their data available to users of various devices that are connected to all types of networks or that are not connected at all. By adapting the assets used by many terminals, and by adapting content delivery options, publishers can monetize content for different
September 2012 Vol.10 No.3
ZTE COMMUNICATIONS
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