Montreal firms using augmented reality
Augmented reality will have a similar effect on the construction industry as the one that the steam engine had on manufacturing processes, according to Andreas Böhm.
He’s the CEO of Sensopia, a Montreal and Munich, Germanybased company that makes Magic Plan, an augmented reality application for making blueprints.
Unlike virtual reality, which tries to place the user in a virtual world, augmented reality aims to bring virtual elements into the real world — think of Pokémon Go, the popular 2016 summer fad.
New technology is allowing augmented reality applications to draw more information from the real world and making it easier for developers to add augmented reality features to existing applications, and a number of local companies are already experimenting with this technology.
With Pokemon Go, “you have an image projected into the real world, seen through your device,” Böhm said. A next-generation augmented reality application, however, “knows where the ground is, it knows where a tabletop is.”
Launched in 2011, Magic Plan allows users to create floor plans by taking pictures of an environment.
“It was one of the first apps to take advantage of the camera and sensors on smartphones and tablets,” Böhm said. “It has used augmented reality to, basically, guide the user through our process to draw and measure floor plans.”
Now it’s taking advantage of the ability of augmented reality applications to better understand the world around them.
“With Magic Plan, you can sketch out a floor plan and, suddenly, you know what is the surface area of your walls. And when you know the surface area of you walls, you know how much paint you need. And when you know how much paint you need, you know how long it’s going to take,” he said.
That ability to easily measure the real world using augmented reality tools is why Böhm said he thinks the technology will be so powerful, because it gives construction companies and contractors a simple way to take a more systematic, orchestrated approach to their work.
Böhm’s company, like many other local companies experimenting with augmented reality, is using ARKit, a tool released by Apple in June.
“The technology’s been around for a while where you can project items from an app into the real world, but when we tried it years ago, it involved printing out a QR code or something that the phone could anchor to,” said Michael Elman, the co-CEO of Montrealbased Budge Studios.
His company makes apps for kids and, he said, the extra steps were just too much work for his young users and their parents.
“But, when in June, Apple announced ARKit,” he said, “not only did it make putting augmented reality tech into your apps very, very easy, it also removed that need for an external item to anchor to.”
Rather than building a standalone AR application, Budge added an AR mode to an app it was already working on, Thomas & Friends Minis, a virtual train set.
“You have a button, and the trains that you’ve made get projected on any surface that you want, so it could be on your desk, on the floor of your room, or it could even be outside in a park,” he said.
He said kids using the AR mode tend to be more active.
“It becomes a toy, it’s a physical thing, it’s not just a touch-screen thing,” he said.
Riposte Games & Co., a St-Lambert-based developer, took a similar approach, adding an AR mode to its existing game, Mini Guns.
While the game isn’t aimed at young children, the characters are cartoonish and toylike. In AR mode, players are able to virtually place those characters on physical objects, like a tabletop.
“You’re able to create an experience where you can take the player even closer to that grey zone between reality and fantasy,” said Johan Eile, the company’s CEO.
Having seen virtual reality struggle to find a market, Eile said he was wary of AR at first.
“It sounded a little gimmicky,” Eile said.
But the quality of modern AR and the ease of adding an AR mode made it worth trying.
While Mini Guns is multiplayer game, the AR mode is a personal experience — only the player using it sees a real world backdrop to the game. Other players, who may be on a PC or an Android phone, which don’t have the AR mode, see the regular, virtual background.
“We’re all experiencing the same game. We’re just experiencing it differently. It’s very cool,” Eile said.
Early feedback has been positive, Eile said.
“Since we launched the AR version of our game, we have seen a 20-per-cent increase in retention and engagement within the game. Essentially, people are spending more time with the app,” he said.
For a free-to-play game like Mini Guns, that’s important because the more time people spend playing the game, the more likely they are to pay for things in the game.
It’s still early days for AR, but local proponents are optimistic.
Budge’s Elman said the ability of a camera-equipped phone to not just take pictures but also understand more about the real world is powerful.
“I don’t think it’s a fad,” he said. “The base technology is here to stay because it’s fascinating.”