Augmented reality — a shared experience

Augmented Reality (AR) can be defined as an interactive experience of the virtual world with the real world, by altering the user’s perception to include computer generated information. The term was coined by researcher Thomas Caudell at Boeing in 1990. Caudell proposed replacing large plywood boards containing plane-specific wiring instructions with head-mounted apparel that would project those instructions/schematics to a multi-purpose board [1].

‍

‍

AR has been used in a variety of settings (including but not limited to):

‍

1. Retail — Consumers trying clothes virtually. Ikea allows people to visualize furniture before purchasing it.
2. Education — An app called Photomath helps students scan math problems from a textbook walking them through the solution [3].
3. Entertainment — Snapchat filters used to create faces/effects.
4. Gaming — Pokemon Go released in 2016, brought mass adoption of AR with over 500M downloads. This grew to 1B+ downloads by 2019, with 100M+ monthly active users [4].

‍

A technology in its infancy.

‍

While AR has reached a wide audience, the technology is still in its infancy with a long way to go before it reaches its full potential. The current technology makes it impractical to have shared experiences. Calibration takes roughly 20–60 seconds for each device due to the high calibration computation cost and high network bandwidth cost, making it exponentially harder for hundreds of people to join a shared AR experience.

‍

This barrier is big enough that currently the top AR technology only allows for up to 8 people to join concurrently. Moreover, the ones that do join have to deal with positioning issues caused by GPS technology being 2D, with only 4.9 meters (16 feet) precision outdoors [5]; and GPS being completely non functional indoors. This isn’t good enough to position AR-created objects precisely across multiple devices.

‍

‍

Introducing the Aukiverse

‍

This is where Auki Labs steps in, with a different approach to solving the positioning problem using peer-to-peer spatial computing to replace GPS. Auki Labs is a tech startup founded by Nils Pihl, Ted Östrem and Santeri Aramo. Working to solve current dilemmas facing AR, they have raised $17.5 million to date in pre-seed/seed rounds [6,7]. They have developed a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows developers to create AR applications built using the Auki technology stack. Some salient aspects of the Auki SDK include:

‍

1. Instant Calibration: Auki Labs has developed a patent-pending instant calibration technique, enabling participating devices to join a multi-user session with a quick and straightforward process such as scanning a QR code.
2. Embodiment: The SDK allows for 3D reconstruction of hands in AR which means you can use your hands to touch the AR-generated objects and interact with them even without using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors.
3. Interoperability: Apps built using the Auki SDK can use Auki’s low-latency cloud to store generated AR assets. If the apps opt in to use Auki’s cloud, those assets can be used across different apps.
4. Collaborative SLAM: Devices/robots that use the Auki SDK, can cooperatively help each other with their real world positioning in real-time, using Auki’s Collaborative Simultaneous Location and Mapping engine.

‍

‍

The Auki metaverse, or Aukiverse, is achieved by leveraging blockchain technology, where customers/apps pay a fee for using the Auki protocol, denominated in AUKI tokens. Network participants will be required to stake a certain amount of tokens. This acts as a disincentive against parties from abusing the network (such as violating privacy, etc.), since abusers will have their tokens slashed. In addition, tokenization enables rewards for network participation, crowdsourcing the creation/maintenance of “Digital Twins” (which are virtual 3D representations of real world locations/objects). Mapping the real world to create digital twins is a resource intensive process, performed mostly by big corporations. Auki brings a paradigm shift by crowdsourcing this to individual users, and allowing them to earn rewards in the process [8].

‍

Overall, Auki has a great vision to lead us into the future of AR, where Augmented Reality can be a truly shared persistent reality; not a buzzword with limited non-scalable experiences as we have today.

Disclaimer: vVv and the author are investors in Auki Labs. This article intends to give an objective view for educational purposes only. This should not be construed as financial advice.

—

Written by Joseph Akhras, edited by @crptogrl2 & @MetaversityOne

—

‌__________________________________________________________________
‍

Website: vvv.exchange

‍

Twitter: https://twitter.com/vvvexchange