Augmented reality has been with us as a piece of technology for a short while now, and it’s an impressive development. It allows us to experience some of the neat features of virtual reality without the need to wear a cumbersome headset. For all of the amazing things that VR is now capable of, the headgear is still a barrier to mass adoption. If the public were willing to wear headsets as part of their day to day lives, virtual reality would be playing a bigger part in those day to day lives. They aren’t, and so it isn’t.
Augmented reality, by contrast, offers a midway point that the majority of people are comfortable with. The technology allows us to look at something through a screen – say, for example, the screen of a smartphone or tablet, and see things that aren’t there in real life. One example of this is the way that Google will allow you to see an image of a full-sized animal in your front room through AR. Another example – one that’s arguably better known – is the game Pokemon Go, which projected Pokemon characters into real-world environments. Even though it doesn’t get as much press attention as it used to, the game is still wildly popular and had a record-breaking year in terms of profits in 2019.
As fun as this form of augmented reality might be, it comes with limitations. You can see things that aren’t there, but you can’t touch them or interact with them, and so all of its uses to date have been linked to the world of entertainment. It’s thought that the next industry to make widespread use of it will be online casinos and online slots. Virtual reality roulette wheels, card tables, and online slots have been a reality for a while now, but the ability to ‘see’ other players and therefore read them better is thought to be the next great innovation within the field. We might be inching closer to being able to manipulate the reels of new UK slots with our hands, but that doesn’t appear to be the next great leap forward. Instead, it looks like we’ll soon be able to copy and paste the real world.
We realize that the sentence we’ve just written is a little difficult to comprehend, so we’ll explain it to you as best we can. Cyril Diagne, a digital artist who currently works with Google, has recently demonstrated a new piece of software technology on Twitter- and it looks incredible. Using a piece of code that he’s written with his own hands, Diagne can take a picture of a real-world object – in his example, it was a vase of flowers – and then with a few button touches, he can ‘paste’ that object into a document on his computer. In Diagne’s case, he instantly posted the picture of a vase into the header of an article he was in the middle of writing. The case went from being in the background of his apartment to being front and center on his document in a matter of moments.
Cynics will be quick to point out that this is already possible. If you have a phone with a good camera, you can easily take a picture of something around you, edit the picture on your phone, and then send it to your computer to be edited and placed into any document you choose. They’re right, but this process was far smoother. Diagne’s computer knew that the phone was attempting to send it an image, and it knew where to put it. The software Diagne has written identified that the camera was pointed at the document, and also identified the area of the document that Diagne was focusing on. At the same time, it eliminated the background of the vase and therefore posted only the image of the vase as a PNG file with no need for further editing. The same effect could have been achieved using existing methods – but it would have been a far more laborious process. This isn’t about offering users something brand new – it’s about offering them something that they already have, but much faster and far more conveniently.
While the version of the code that Diagne has built for personal use clearly works, it’s specific to his phone and his computer. It would require editing and adapting in order to make a product that worked universally – but he’s happy for aspiring programmers to try. Instead of hoarding the project for himself, Diagne has made his code open-source and posted it on Github for other people to shape and mold for their own purposes. The possibilities of what the software could do are almost endless, but there is obvious commercial potential in his work. Personalizing everything from greetings cards to t-shirts could be the work of seconds rather than minutes or hours in the very near future. Find the perfect stock image for your project will no longer involve trawling through endless possibilities online – if you have the perfect object in your home, the software can pick it up, sharpen it, trim away the unwanted background elements and deposit it in the middle of your program without ruining your layout. To put it another way, it’s a designer’s dream.
As the code is now available online, we suspect it’s a matter of time until someone uses it for a commercial endeavor. It might take a while to solve the problem of making the software work universally across all devices – especially where different security protocols exist from device to device – but the problem should be relatively easy to solve for the right developer or developers. Based on what we’ve seen – and you can see yourself on his Twitter account – Diagne’s work may just have ushered us out of the era where augmented reality is the preserve of gamers, and into an era where it’s a vital part of any designer’s toolkit. You still might not be able to touch the virtual world that you can see through an augmented reality screen, but you can copy and paste it – and that’s the next best thing.
