Aurasma app is augmented reality, augmented

Arriving a quarter hour early for a central London briefing this morning I decided to sit in leafy St James's Square, near Piccadilly, to scan the latest tweets. But before I could do so I spotted a man on a street corner staring intently at an iPad 2 he had trained on the gates to the square.
He showed me what he was watching: onscreen, Marilyn Monroe was apparently dancing in a bright yellow summer dress in the morning sunshine on the edge of the square before us. The guy was beaming at the sheer quality of the augmented reality imagery.


As you may have guessed, this iPad 2 user was the technology entrepreneur I had come to meet: Mike Lynch, co-founder and chief executive of Autonomy, the British software house. I wanted to hear about the augmented reality app his firm has just developed - in part because I couldn't fathom the link between AR and the firm's claim to fame to date: predictive software.

Autonomy has gone from nothing in 1996 to a firm worth £7 billion today by leveraging the theories of an 18th-century English mathematician and cleric called the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who worked out how to calculate the probability that certain variables are associated, whether they are words, behaviours or images. Lynch and his colleagues built their business on a pattern recognition engine called the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (Idol) that uses algorithms based on Bayes' ideas.

On the London tube, Autonomy's Bayesian algorithms that analyse CCTV images to calculate the likelihood someone will try to commit suicide by jumping under a train - allowing the track current to be turned off and help sought. If you follow Formula 1, Ross Brawn's Mercedes F1 team identifies the potential source of every advantage gained by rival teams by training Autonomy algorithms on post-race video. To prevent fraud or noncompliance with the financial laws, workplace emails are analysed to infer risk. And police can use Idol to seek hidden patterns in crime reports.

But that's in the PC world. Now, says Lynch, they want to exploit the awesome and growing power of smartphones like Android and iPhone/iPad. To do this they have written an app they've called Aurasma that allows anybody to associate real world items with online content, which they liken to an aura - hence the name.

"We won't be creating the content but we will be providing the infrastructure - including a 10,000-computer server farm - that allows it to be delivered to the real world," says Lynch.
The idea is that media companies can use Aurasma to relate printed matter - street posters, newspapers, magazines - to compelling video and online content they have made themselves or from TV stations and movie studios. Such use will require payments to Autonomy.

But for the rest of us, the service will be free: you can create your own content you'd like to relate to a place, a building or a park, say. And a social network will be built around this, too, allowing users to follow people whose environmental multimedia content they like.

To make it work, Autonomy's coders have rewritten their Bayesian algorithms for iOS and Android. Because Idol is a robust, probabilistic decision-making system, it means that users do not have to train their phone cameras on a flat, brightly-lit subject. The printed matter can be bent away from the camera at odd 3D angles, be dimly lit and yet still be recognised. And the probability calculation ensures that the displayed video stays withing the bounds of the matter being looked at. So a newspaper photo of David Beckham will pull up video of him playing for LA Galaxy that stays within the image frame on the newspaper's image.

Aurasma for print media hits the Apple Appstore next week, with a version for TV stations arriving in a month. Augmented reality is a hot field of endeavour and Autonomy will have its work cut out making a dent in this nascent field. Major publishers like Carlton Books are already shipping books that use it, for instance.
But Lynch is unruffled by the task. As I leave his office for the sunshine of St James's Square, it's clear he's particularly proud of having squeezed an 18th-century cleric into our pockets.

Paul Marks

Source New Scientist