Marmota mobile AR gives you useful information
I have been traveling a lot in the past years and usually in places that were unknown to me. Or at least the surroundings. Sometimes, when I saw a beautiful landscape, some snowy peaks or lakes that were really impressive I asked myself what their names were. Sometimes I could get an answer by looking on the mp or asking somebody who has already been there, however I still have some questions that have no answer. It seems however that this problem will soon be solved by your mobile.
The Marmota mobile with Augmented Reality (AR) app is intended to give you information about the landscape in front of you in real time, by supra-posing the information on the picture you want to take. The Marmota mobile was designed by Michele Zanin, Claudio Andreatta and Paul Chippendale, researchers at the Technologies of Vision Unit (TeV) in the Information Technology Centre of Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) in Trento, Italy. They are working on the application since 2007 and very soon will be given to volunteers for testing.
Te technology behind the app includes cartography and vision algorithms. At the same time, they say that every pixel of the image has the altitude, latitude, longitude and distance from the observer associated with. But how exactly does the MArmota mobile work? Very easy in fact. The Marmota has in-built GPS and is able to automatically transmit its position to a server, the minute you activate it. Then, the server will process the data and send it back; the data will be displayedas a high-resolution 360-degree augmented onscreen overlay.
At that point you are going to see on the screen information such as name of the mountain – let’s say you want to take a picture of a mountain -, its height and location. Moreover, the app can also give information about roads, hiking trails, rivers and lakes. In this way I will always know where I am and what I take a picture of. Great app this mobile AR; hope it will be available next year.
