Sony today announced the development of integrated Augmented Reality (‘AR’) technology called as Smart AR. When capturing visuals through a camera on a device such as a smartphone, the technology enables additional information to be displayed on the device’s screens such as virtual objects, or images and texts that cannot be identified by visual perception alone. The technology employs the markerless approach, forgoing any requirement for special markers such as 2D barcodes. The object captured by the camera is quickly recognized and can be tracked at high-speed along with the movement of the camera, as it is displayed over the actual 3D space. AR technology has recently been the subject of much interest, and is being used in a variety of applications such as advertisements, promotions, games, and information searches.
Information can be acquired or navigated by simply touching the AR information directly on the screen of the smartphone or other device, thus achieving an intuitive and seamless user interface that is unique to SmartAR. Sony will continue to experiment with SmartAR technology with the aim to add new value for various services and business applications such as advertising and games.