One of the most popular Android applications, Layar is an AR browser that allows you to choose an information overlay to fit on top of what your phone is displaying of your surroundings on your mobile screen through the camera lens. So, if you want to find somewhere to eat, you hit the restaurant’s layer and see what pops up on your real time view but, as Sandor points out, that’s pretty much the limit of consumer augmented reality as it stands. “Most AR on mobiles at the moment only really uses your compass and actually not the camera at all. It just overlays information on what’s already there. What we’ve been looking at for a while now is a way to manipulate the camera image as well.” What Sandor is referring to is a trio of technologies on the benches in Magic Vision, all of which make Pocket-lint’s jaw drop a few inches lower each time as he sends over the links to the demo videos to describe the research. Each of the techniques are based on the problems of how to best display AR information that’s either outside of the frame of where you happen to have your mobile phone pointed, or that which is occluded by objects in the foreground.
